Social media according to Guy Kawasaki

As soon as I saw the car line snaking slowly from the I-5 offramp to the hotel, I knew this association meeting was a hot ticket. The 25 minutes it took to get to the hotel- on a normal day it would have been 5- was nothing compared to the time it took to find a parking place. What was this, a rock concert? A championship sports game? Finally, I was in: The conference room filled with 600+ business owners, marketing experts, real estate brokers, software engineers, and venture capitalists was filled to capacity. The talk by Guy Kawasaki put on by the San Diego Venture Group (@sdvg) was about to begin.

Now, as the co-founder of Alltop.com (an online magazine rack) and the founding partner at Garage Technology Ventures, Guy Kawasaki fundamentally challenges the way business owners do business. On Twitter and other social media platforms, he has been accused of being a spammer, a pornographer, and worse. Most of the things he does are out of the box. Maybe that is why he has 150,000 followers on Twitter- he has something interesting to say.

In fact, he states, “If you don’t p--- people off, then you aren’t engaging.”

According to Kawasaki, we have some catching up to do here in San Diego. When asked, only 85% of the conference audience claimed to use LinkedIn- and only about 60% claimed to use Twitter. How can your business make the most of a social media strategy? Here are some of Kawasaki’s top networking sites for businesses, along with a few tips on how your businesses can use social media for online marketing.

LinkedIn

• Checking references: When hiring an employee, don’t check references they give to you. Search employees that worked at their company during the same time and contact them directly.
• Checking companies: On LinkedIn, you can see where business employees came from and where they go after they leave. Kawasaki shows an example of Microsoft and jokingly comments that Microsoft employees come from HP and go to Google when they leave. "That tells you what kind of people they have working there," he says sarcastically.

Jigsaw – This site allows you to get contact information from others that sign up. On caveat- you will have to register in order to use, and will need to pay to access certain information.

Spokeo – This site is the queen of HR departments. Anything and everything online can be found here. Might be a good idea to search your own name first and then any employees you plan to hire.

Facebook - The verdict is still out on whether Facebook is a good marketing tool for business. Big B2C brands like Starbucks, L’Oreal, and Nike have seen some success, but if you are a small company, Kawasaki says you are just talking to yourself and competitors.

And then, of course, there’s Twitter. According to Kawasaki, "Twitter is the best thing to happen to marketing since television." Here are a few of Kawasaki’s tips for using Twitter to increase your business:

Positioning yourself or your company as experts

Before you use Twitter, review some of the top companies out there first to see how it’s done. Check out @jetblue @delloutlet @virginamerica @comcastcares @kogibbq to start. Instead of tweeting what you are doing, you should tweet about what you find interesting.

Customer service

True story: A passenger on Virgin Airlines tweeted that he didn’t get served food. During that same flight, the customer service team saw his tweet and messaged the pilot-who then told the team to get the man his food - quick.

Finding employees, partners, VCs or others in your industry

Search relevant keywords within a certain mile radius by going to Twitter search. For example, if you are a Camaro dealer and want to find out if anyone is tweeting about Camaro within 100 miles of your shop, you’d go here. If you are a credit card processing company, look for people frustrated with their merchant account within 20 miles. Shouldn’t be that hard to find someone who’s looking for what you offer.

Promote your products and company brand

Yes, it’s okay to promote your brand from time-to-time, says Kawasaki, as long as people don’t start viewing your tweets as spam. You have to say something that matters first, and promote later.

Staying logged in to Twitter 24/7 doesn’t make sense for a small business owner. Here are some tools that help you manage your accounts, and track your progress.

1. TweetDeck and Twhirl allow you to manage multiple Twitter accounts, view responses and direct messages and list groups in one vertical.
2. Objective Marketer is a site where you can track your progress. You can also check out some of the other tracking sites that Kawasaki didn’t mention, like bit.yl and Retweetist.
3. TweetHawk allow you to send out an automatic message when people follow you. You can also use this to send an automatic message when a specific keyword is tweeted.

However, you’ll pay 5 cents per message sent and could be considered spam.

If you effectively use social media-providing advice and promoting specials, people will listen. Kawasaki schedules tweets into his calendar, and sometimes sends the same tweet out multiple times when he really wants to spread the word. You can do this too. Sure, you might annoy some people off, but that’s actually kind of the point.