On the bonus side, nobody can tell that you haven’t pressed your dress suit!

If you really want to rock the party, it pays to have a clear idea of why you are there in the first place. If it’s primarily a customer growth objective or a credibility objective, this will effect your follow strategy.

Here’s a few tried and tested, but imaginitive ways of finding people to follow…

1. Use a Directory

A number of directories exist just for people on Twitter. You can search for Twitter users by their interests or categories and/or geo-location. www.wefollow.com is one of the largest, and allows for both interest and location based searches. Other directories include www.twellow.com, www.justtweetit.com, www.twitterdirectory.com and www.geofollow.com .

Make sure you add yourself to these directories too; so that you can be found by people who are interested in your chosen categories and physical location.

2. Speaker ‘Circuits’

If you want to follow and establish a presence with the leaders of your industry, it’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with the ’speaker circuit’. Industry leaders and conference speakers tend to have a highly visible media presence and you will find many on Twitter. Check your industry conference and exhibition websites for a list of speakers. Most websites will feature a detailed speaker profile with Twitter ID included. If not, take your list of names and do a “Find People” search on Twitter.

3. Competitor Websites

Following your competitors is always a great idea. If your industry is super cut-throat, be warned that they may not follow you back, or may even block you from seeing their Tweets. This is a bit extreme and most competitors will have nothing to hide from you, and many may welcome a bit of banter and exchange with an industry peer.If any of your competitors are on Twitter, most will have a link to their profile on their website.

4. Follower-Drilling

Once you have identified a good person or competitor to follow, check who is following them and use the profile information in the followers list to see who could also be of interest to you. In most cases with a well managed Twitter account, you will find followers of a like-mind.

5. Keyword Searching/Hashtags (#)

Use the Twitter search functionality to search for keywords or hashtags that are relevent to your brand and your product. A hashtag is slightly different to a keyword in that adding a hashtag to a Tweet, collates all Tweets that use the hashtag, regardless of content. As an example #LAC is the hashtag for the London Affiliate Conference next week. I may well see Tweets like this…

“Where is everyone staying then? #LAC”

or…

“Going to the closing party?” #LAC

So a hashtag, when used correctly, can help you identify people that are involved or interested in something, even if their Tweet content does not specifically call this out.

Search results for keywords will show Tweets from Twitter users that have referenced the keyword in their Tweet. In many cases this may be because they have a specific interest in your product. It may be a good idea to directly introduce yourself to them by sending a Tweet (@mention) solely to them. Be aware that someone you follow will be quite likely to click your profile to assess if it is worth following you, so please don’t do this!

I want To Be Special!

Tip: If you use a third party application such as Tweetdeck you can create a column for your keyword search or hashtag and all public tweets containing your keyword or hashtag will appear in this column in realtime.

6. Other Social Media

Many other social media sites allow users to add their Twitter ID to their existing profile. If you already have an established community elsewhere, such as your Linkedin network, then check the profiles of your contacts and those that are also on Twitter will be easy to find!

Of course, the standard way to find people on Twitter is to use the “Find People” search within Twitter, however this is a little long-winded and relies on you knowing who you are looking for by name.

We hope these resources and tips give you a bit more of boost to your follow strategy, so that you can easily find people to learn from, connect with, market to and create a relationship with. Do you have any questions about Twitter in general that you would like to see answered in this blog? And do let me know if you have any cool ideas for identifying people to follow!

This year however I’m speaking, reporting, live blogging and all sorts.

I’m really excited having been off the scene for a while. Also I’m a little nervous about seeing and meeting all those people I have spent the past year stalking, befriending, admiring and engaging with on Twitter. I have a bad habit of seeing celebrities in London and thinking we’re old friends, so I’m not confident in my avatar recognition skills. Please don’t be offended if I walk past you. Grab me and explain who you are and we’ll get on like a house on fire I’m sure. Or you may get dragged into a room at SES and interviewed for SEO-Chicks. (If you’re really, really lucky )

First up is #LAC, or London Affiliate Conference (Gaming). I’m speaking on a panel about advanced social media strategies; lead by social media expert @JudithLewis. Judith has been online, since there’s been an ‘online’ and truly knows her onions when it comes to social media, search engine optimisation, paid search, quality chocolate and indeed most other things. I’m excited to meet my fellow panellists, who are Sarah Goodwin of Bloom Media; Matt Nash of OOSOCIAL and Zoe Sands from Cisco.

We have a tough gig though as we’re on Saturday (30th January) last session of the day, on the last day, on the session before the partayyyy! BUT. We’re giving away free stuff including wine and chocolate and I may even have something pretty speshup my sleeve.

So please come and heckle/learn/laugh/eat/drink/snooze/whatever: just come! You will certainly pick up some gems of information, that could help increase your audience and brand rapport; even if you’re an experienced social media communicator.

If on the other hand, if you have no idea what ‘#LAC’ (hashtag) means, or why I’ve prefixed a name with an “@” – then you have to come!

John Prescott on Twitter

I think that this is a great thing. The product capabilities of social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube have opened more than just a new functionality-driven approach to customer communication. Over time, such media have shown us that customers have longed for that personal route and that feeling of belonging, so it’s actually a shift in mind-set we’re seeing.

I’m a member of Virgin Wines, and every time I receive an order I throw the cardboard box in the recycling pile out back. Last time (which was just before Christmas) I happened to notice on the side of the box, the following message; “Did your driver do a good job today?”

Virgin Wines Social Feedback on Delivery Boxes

Isn’t that great? I think this is a bit of a mind-shift from the punative tone of similar messages seen on the back of professional vehicles. What struck me here is that, this is a personal request for feedback on an individual, that is motivated seemingly by desire to reward and encourage good performance.

I’d like to think that brands like Virgin Wines are seeing how well received is the social element in their interaction with customers and are thus embracing this mindset; this friendly and human tone of voice, throughout all of their communications.

A Cardboard Box Can Be A Social Medium!

My point then… customers really want to interact with you. Customers are human beings just like your employees. Customers might not have cared so much about who you are, until you showed them they could.

With the Virgin Wines example, I was immediately warmed to the thought that they care about my experience, they value my feedback, and they also value their staff by rewarding good performance. I want to continue to be a customer of a business like that. I’ll admit that I intended to send an email, but got distracted by what awaited me in my inbox. If they’d given me the option to tweet @virginwines then I definitely would have; and would have said something like “the man brought fine wines to my house. I am in love with him”.

Instances of brands embracing the social mindset are occurring more often in Europe, but it’s been happening for a while in the U.S. Coca Cola famously offered two of their biggest fans a job, after (said fans) Dusty and Michael created a kick-ass facebook fan page some time in 2008. Rather than contact Facebook and demand these guys handover the page to them (which Facebook will allow you to do), Coca-Cola obviously thought who better to run their fan page, than such die-hard, genuine fans? If you haven’t come across this story before; its a great social media case study, and you can find a thorough review on Econsultancy.com by Patricio Robles.

Now 'Offical' Fan Page

Brands aren’t just becomming more social-minded in the way that they involve consumers though. We’re also seeing brands communicate a human approach by telling us about the people that work for them. I’m thinking in particular of the charming and amusing “Intel Star” TV ads.

I took this video from their official “channelintel” on Youtube, where they state “Rather than focusing on a new product, the 2009 “Sponsors of Tomorrow” ad campaign celebrates what makes Intel different; culture, personality, heroes…”

That Intel are taking the trouble to endear to us the people that make the things that other companies stick into the machines we use to connect online, is a great testement to the brands embracing a social mindset. Even the less consumer facing brands!

What Does This Mean To Me?

I’m aware that all of the examples above reference brands that are hugely well known and have the sort of marketing budgets the rest of us dream of. Because of this, I think we can have more faith in the benefit of adopting a social mindset in approaching your customer communications. Huge brands like Virgin, Intel and Coca-Cola do not do things lightly. When your revenue is into millions and billions of dollars, you do not invest in a campaign direction without research and analysis. If these brands recognise a customer desire to connect and act on it; we won’t go far wrong to follow their example.

What Practical Lessons Can We Put Into Practise Here?

1. Be Consistent: Decide your social media brand identity and register it in as many places as you can. Use the same brand name, brand icon and profile precis throughout. You will probably benefit from having one detailed profile and a brief profile version, depending on the media tone of voice and character space available.

2. Be Everywhere: Register your social media profile in as many places as possible, starting with the most suitable for your audience and focusing your time in the same way. Even if you never intend to communicate via e.g. Bebo, you can at least protect your brand and make yourself available in the event a potential customer wants to interact with you there.

3. Be One Brand With One Voice: Instead of referencing “our Twitter account”, or “Our Linkedin account” think of your brand as everywhere online, and the social media platform is just the lens through which a customer may prefer to see you. Instead think “come find us on Linkedin”, “come join our fans on Facebook”.

4. Listen And Learn: Save the one-way “me, me, me” messaging for the spammers. Use the functionalities of social media that faciliate two-way communication. Monitor post interactions on Facebook, check your @mentions on Twitter; and most importantly try to respond and acknowledge those who participate.

5. Let Go Of Your Brand: I’m not saying you have to ‘do a Coca-Cola’, however it’s important to know that the people that buy your product have every right to mention your product and feed back about your product. It’s how you handle that feedback and what you can learn from it that is invaluable.

So there we are. None of this is remotely unfamiliar is it? In fact you may have been reminded in the anecdotes here about your favourite local caf, or the corner shop from your childhood. I think it is human nature that we crave recognition and we want to be valued as an individual customer and not a sales statistic. Social media websites have the functionality to enable brands that would other wise be very distant, to feel more local and approachable. From this; we’ve been reminded of what we already knew.

A social mindset is nothing new. What’s (fairly) new is that online technology faciliates a local and social approach not previously possible for national and international business. And your customers will love it!

1. Be discoverable
From Facebook to YouNoodle, many social media/networking websites offer you the chance to have your content surfaced to the search engines. DO take advantage of this opportunity. Firstly this is valuable from an SEO perspective as these sites and your presence on these sites can be spidered by search bots. Such reference to your brand and links back to your site from high-volume high-credibility sites, helps improve your own PageRank. Second reason to tick that box, is that if anyone searches for your brand, they will be able to see not only your own website, but also your presence on the social media websites you have chosen. Provided you are consistent in referencing your brand (more on this in a second) this helps add validity to your organisation and faith in your brand as the user is confronted with a back-up reference to your brand from additional trusted sites. Incidentally, if your own website appears below your Facebook/Linkedin/Crunchbase profile – come see us and we’ll sort that out for you!

2. Be consistent
Your brand is your intellectual property and should be treated as such. Larger organisations tend to have entire rulebooks dedicated to their various brand identities, corporate fonts, logos and other marks. Every brand, (no matter what size) should have some basic rules in place regarding company name, logo(s) and profile. As an example – our company name is theMediaFlow (all one word, with the emphasis on Media and Flow by the use of a capital ‘M’ and ‘F’) if you search for “themediaflow” using Google, you will find a number of results on page one, including our own site, our Linkedin profile, our CrunchBase profile and various news stories about us. In nearly every case the result references “theMediaFlow”. If a result references “themediaflow” this appears to be an inconsistency, and it would be natural for a reader to place less trust in such a listing. Your social media profile is your chance to reinforce your exact brand identity, image and message in a consistent, professional and controlled way.

3. Be your own biggest fan
Unless you’re McDonalds or CocaCola (in which case, “Hi, we’d love to manage your SEM. Skype me!”) you probably can’t afford to advertise on every billboard in town and in the Corry Street ad breaks. Until that time, social media is your space to promote your business and talk about how wonderful you are, what you do and who you do it for. Do not be ashamed to big yourselves up. Never feel silly writing in the third person; and DO remember to be consistent. We find it helps to use the same profile précis as a starting point for each of our professional network profiles.

4. Be yourself
You can’t win every single deal and you can’t please every single customer 100% of the time. Each organisation has its own cultural ethos and identity. It’s what makes an organisation most distinct from competitors. Ask anyone who has just chosen a supplier what clinched the deal for them, and oftentimes they will state that “the organisation was a good fit”;” the people really understood our business,” “we got a really positive vibe from the team” etc. It is therefore important to allow some sense of your organisational values and culture to permeate your social media communications.

You will find that the technical/functional differences between networks contribute to a certain tone of voice, i.e. Twitter’s 140 character limit promotes familiarity and less formality than say a Linkedin profile; therefore trying to have the same rigid tone of voice across all your social media may seem insincere.

Please note: I’m not advocating that every brand should do their own social media communications, but a good third party social media professional should be able to communicate with your audience as an extended member of your team. They should be able to speak of “we” and “our” goals and missions; and be able to understand your business objectives, core customers and values.

We hope you found this post interesting and useful. Please do add any other pertinent points that you think we have missed that are important for growing your social media brand.

As the TechCrunch team are putting the finishing touches to the the Europas, the TechCrunch Europe Awards 2009 Park Lane Champagne have been busy showcasing their services providing personalised Champagne. Even in single bottles they can print, label and dispatch unique, customised bottles of the finest French Champagne.

In their understandable enthusiasm to salute the best of European technology and start-ups they have accidentally printed too many labels and therefore have 3 bottles of Limited Edition Winners Champagne to give away, now everyone can celebrate like a winner, enter to win:

Rules

* Anyone can play
* Follow Park Lane Champagne @nonvintage on twitter…
* Tweet @nonvintage [and then add the 3 words that describe your favourite Champagne]
* Park Lane Champagne decide who wins based on the best (funny, outrageous, sad, boring… you get the idea)
* All over on 29th July (so be around 31st for delivery!)

To find out more about personalised champagne for a special gift, party or corporate event, visit www.parklanechampagne.co.uk

1. Introduce an aggressive analytics procedure.

It matters not that the revenue you generate goes forward to support a cause, as opposed to generate a profit. An online donation is still a conversion, or ‘sale’. Analyse your traffic on a regular basis (at least monthly) to identify benchmark performance metrics and trends, and adapt accordingly. Using products such as Omniture SiteCatalyst, or Google Analytics (free), you can set your own criteria as to what is a conversion, though I would suggest the key conversion would be the completion of a donation transaction. You should on a weekly or monthly basis, look at the absolute number of unique users, by referring source of traffic and total number of donations for the same period. If you divide the total number of donations by the total number of unique users (by referral source) you will know your average conversion rate for the time period. You can then analyse each referring source individually to assess if that source provides quality traffic, i.e. traffic that converts at a rate equal to or higher than average conversion rate. If you have a spreadsheet whizz (or if you can afford a data analyst in your organisation) have them put together a pivot table with other comparable data, such as average donation value (site-wide), compared to average donation value by referral source. In terms of using the data, such analysis will show you how and where to focus your traffic generation efforts. If, for example you discover that a medium sized source of traffic, has a conversion rate half of the average and a low donation value – you know you could be using your time more efficiently elsewhere, by growing a smaller, but more efficient referral source.

2. Online advertising (for free).

It goes without saying that one of the best ways to attract online donations to your cause, is to advertise your cause to people online! As a charity you get to do this for free! Yes. Seriously. Free. Not everywhere of course, but on Google AdWords for example. Google Grants is the scheme that allows registered charities to apply for a free grant, of $10,000 a month to spend on AdWords. Of course there is a heavily scrutinised application procedure to avoid abuse of this scheme, and it does take a very long time to be approved. However for $10,000 a month to spend on one of the most responsive and efficient forms of advertising (search engine marketing), with the world’s largest search engine, who can’t wait a few months? Find out more about Google Grants.

Additionally; to raise brand awareness and profile you should take advantage of free advertising opportunities that exist with some of the display ad networks. AdJug, for example is one of the fastest growing, open and transparent ad-exchanges in Europe, serving over 1 Billion ad impressions a month, and offering free inventory opportunities to a different charity each month. Contact Nikki Staveley to find out if you qualify.

3. Use Social Media to Increase Donations

As a charity, you naturally have an engaging message and purpose that will strike a chord with many people. Social media is therefore a perfect and free method of interacting with your supporters, finding and attracting new supporters, and of course generating traffic and donations to your website. What is social media? In this case we’re talking about online media which allows members to link up, share information, establish a profile, contribute stories and develop two-way communications. Such examples of social media that facilitate this behaviour are Facebook, Twitter and Qype. Let’s be clear however that there are different ways of using social media; i.e. advertising on a social media outlet, or being an active and valuable member of a social media outlet. We’re talking specifically about being an active and valuable member of a social media outlet. As the first stage of the buying cycle is ‘awareness’, using social media to increase awareness of your brand, cause, values and work is an absolutely invaluable opportunity. Posting stories, interesting facts and time-sensitive campaign information is easily possible using social media, and all serves to engage your community of fans, friends and followers with your core message. Our recent work with GlobalGiving UK, a charity that supports real people and projects at grass roots level uncovered some incredible statistics and a case for expansion of social media strategy. Our analysis showed that Facebook and Twitter featured highly in the top referring domains for GlobalGiving UK traffic, and most importantly that this traffic resulted in conversion to donation at a far higher than average rate. In the case of Twitter this was twice the average conversion to donation rate, and with Facebook – even higher still.

Follow @GlobalGivingUK to see how they are communicating their message to Twitter friends or become a fan on Facebook.

1.  Set an objective

Set an objective for your social media strategy to help you focus your efforts efficiently. You can go the ‘whole mnemonic hog’ with a detailed SMART objective. (Your objective should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable and Realistic in a given Time,) or keep things a little more relaxed. As long as you have a specific, realistic goal and an awareness of the tracking tools and measurements of success that are out there, you have the right framework. An example social media objective could be… “promote customer awareness and engagement with my brand by attracting a couple of hundred fans to my Facebook page in a month.”

2. Work the 80/20 rule

You know the 80/20 rule? You get 80% of your revenue from 20% of your clients? Well it’s true for audience as well. It’s extremely important with the huge volume of social media sites, products, tools and applications; that you focus the majority of your efforts where you have the biggest potential return on your (time) investment. Unless social media marketing is your full time job, you need to go where the greatest audience is. Facebook reached 22.7 million visitors in the UK in February (Comscore), which is over two thirds of the UK online population. Twitter grew 1689% year on year in the UK to almost 2 million users in March (NNR). It goes without saying that you do need to consider your audience demographic when compiling the short-list of sites for your social media campaign.

3. Create a consistent social media brand

Use and abuse all the customisation features and profile fields that you possibly can, to customise the look and feel of your profile page and deliver your message. It’s important to make sure that you use the same photograph (or logo), same strap-line and profile data, and the same company name and format conventions to represent your brand. If you don’t make and keep your profiles consistent, professional and recognisable you run the risk of being taken for an imposter profile (sometimes great for a laugh,) however users will be less likely to tune into and take notice of your message if they’re not 100% convinced as to your authenticity.

4. Integrate your social media

So you’re Digging and Tweeting and cultivating yourself an entourage big enough to push Paris out of the VIP area. Great. What about your company website? If you are generating awareness and interest in your brand and leading traffic back to your website, are users offered the same message and tone of voice as your social media? If your company website content is a little dry and lacking in social features this may put people off. Such mismatch in content positioning and tone of voice may come off as a little insincere. Additionally, for potential customers coming to your company website from search engines or type-ins, you may miss the opportunity to connect and interact if you fail to reference and promote your social media outlets. There are plenty of well designed, social media icons available freely on the web that you can use to easily drop onto the relevant space on your site, such as this lovely set from web design agency FHOKE. http://www.fhoke.com/blog/2009/05/07/a-set-of-14-free-social-icons/

Right... that’s the easy bit. Now comes the most important part, which is all up to you! Make sure that you have some great content, advice, giveaways and information to share with your friends, followers and fans or they may not stick around for too long.

theMediaFlow blog is written by Nichola Stott, who you can follow on Twitter @NicholaStott.