I’m giving a few presentations over coming weeks on how to use social media, and specifically twitter, for business. As I draft my presentations and seek out case studies – yes, using twitter – key themes are emerging. It’s a hard world out there, especially if you are a small business owner, and everyone is looking for that competitive edge. Knowing your clients and your market will give you that edge. Actually engaging with these people will add a greater dimension to the relationship they have with your brand. And in competitive times, people are more likely to spend money with someone they have a positive relationship with rather than someone they don’t.

If you want to successfully engage with your clients, customers, suppliers, broad market, and yes, even your competitors, you need to do at least some of the following – and preferably all of them:

1. be interesting. Don’t just tweet about yourself and your product – nobody likes an ego. Share interesting links, articles, and information that OTHER people have written.
2. use the retweet function. It’s NOT all about you! Retweeting other people’s tweets is also a great way to get more followers.
3. have conversations with other tweeps. And if someone tweets you directly, acknowledge that. Especially if they ask you a question or comment on something you’ve said. After all, no one likes to be ignored.
4. ask for help. Most people like to help others if asked. My tweets that generate a lot of chatter are those that ask for advice or help. Especially if it’s technical. And to do with computers. Lots of techie people are on twitter. Go figure
5. give referrals and recommendations. I am a big believer in the whole giver’s gain philosophy and I aim to give at least 1 referral a day. Twitter makes this easy as a lot of people are often asking for advice (see #4). I now get asked directly for a lot of recommendations, especially for food related advice.
6. ask people’s opinions. Asking for an opinion makes people feel valued, and really, who doesn’t like that feeling?
7. promote other people’s stuff. This may be through retweeting or it may be promoting people who are not on twitter. I especially try and promote other people’s stuff if it involves fundraisers or other charitable activity
8. DO NOT SEND AUTOMATIC DMs. This is one very quick way to seriously annoy other tweeps and one guaranteed way to be quickly unfollowed faster than you can say Auto DM Spam. Yes, acknowledge a new follower with a DM, but please make it personal. Along the lines of “Hi Mel, looking forward to reading your food tweets!”
9. say thank you. This is just basic good manners. Especially if people regularly retweet you or help you out.
10. give praise, acknowledgement and encouragement . You’ll know when the time is right for this. A tweep I follow FINALLY ditched her ghastly boyfriend. There was a lot of praise and encouragement flowing that day.
11. have empathy. My most amazing twitter experience was when my mum died last year. The outpouring of sympathy and empathy from hundreds of people I didn’t know in either real life OR on twitter was mind boggling. This support helped me (and my family, none of whom actually “get” twitter) through an incredibly difficult time. It symbolises why I love twitter.

OK so that was 11. Not 10. Yes I can count. And I even live with an accountant. Let’s thank GST for the bonus.

What are your top tips for using twitter for business? I’d love to hear them.

I sat down last night to pull a few stats together and to reflect on the emotions of the last 10 days. Of course I’m talking about the phenomenon that has become Baked Relief (or #bakedrelief if you are following on twitter).

My personal involvement began on Tuesday 11 January 2011 when my hubby called at 9am to say his office was being evacuated in preparation of the floods that were due to hit Brisbane from the following day. I popped along to the shops to stock up on a few essentials – extra milk, more fruit and veg, and some ingredients to bake a couple of chocolate cakes, sausage rolls and a few sandwiches to help feed some of the volunteers that I knew would be helping with preparations to stem the flow of the rising river.

Wednesday 12 January 2011 – hubby {Shaun Leck} popped along to help fill sandbags to fill sandbags at our local Council Depot, and landed his first media appearance – an interview in the Age.

Since then Baked Relief has exploded. My friend Danielle first used the twitter hashtag #bakedrelief on Tuesday 11 January and blogged about it on http://digella.blogspot.com. Offers of help and baking have come flooding in {couldn’t resist that one }.

Baked Relief is now providing food to thousands of people, including those that were flood affected; Volunteering QLD; the SES; QLD Police, Fire & Ambulance workers; the military helping clean up; and so many others who are helping with the massive clean up.

To me Baked Relief symbolises what can happen when the power of social media comes into play. Primarily due to the reach and influence of twitter, facebook and blogs, support has been generated, sponsors have come forward, money has been donated and people have been fed. Would this have happened without social media? Yes, of course it would have. Would it have happened with the same speed and volume, now that’s highly unlikely.

Baked Relief quickly crossed over from social media to mainstream media, with mainstream media picking up the story and first mentioning Baked Relief on Sunday 16 January 2011. This generated an increased number of people getting involved {and a HUGE increase in emails in my in-box as people wanted to know HOW they could help}.

The Baked Relief website was launched on Monday 17 January and had just under 2,500 hits in its first 12 hours.

I also launched the Adopt-a-family program on my food blog, The Cook’s Notebook, on Monday 17 January and we have had nearly 300 families already volunteer to help feed a flood affected family for possibly up to a year! We have now partnered with Flood Aid to coordinate this program.

A few stats (as of Thursday 20 January) and other interesting things about Baked Relief:

• Baked Relief has had significant national media coverage with 5 print articles and 14 interviews on radio and television, including the high rating national breakfast TV show, The Today Show (you can watch us at http://news.ninemsn.com.au/video.aspx?videoid=82710eac-1c30-4790-bcb5-45170616ef55)
• Countless blog mentions and web-posts
• 4,230 mentions on Google when you search on #bakedrelief
• Thousands of facebook and twitter mentions
• Reached #2 in trending hashtags in Australia on Tuesday 18 January (on previous days was #3, #4, #5
• While we haven’t been able to effectively measure how many people are baking for Baked Relief but we assume it’s at least 1,000 in South East Queensland (not just Brisbane). It’s grown too organically for us to count!
• People are driving from over 2 hours away to deliver food, and we know of at least one group (Funky Pies) who drove up from Sydney (about 1,000km and 12 hour drive) to deliver their pies to people working at Volunteering Queensland, Queensland Police and an evacuation centre.

Baked Relief is changing the way people are using social media – and in particular twitter. Yesterday I tweeted “I wonder how many people have signed up to twitter just because of #bakedrelief”. About 20 people replied saying that they had either joined twitter SOLELY because of Baked Relief or they joined ages ago and are now only actually using it actively because of Baked Relief. WOW.

Yesterday I also tweeted social media guru David Meerman Scott to alert him to the real-time communication that led to such a massive response for Baked Relief. When he messaged me back to say he’d love to blog about it I danced around the car park I was in at the time! My excitement was off the scale! Read David’s blog. And THANK YOU David!! I hope I can buy you a beer when you are in Brisbane in April.

For more information on Baked Relief or how you can contribute go to www.bakedrelief.org.

As I was tweeting about a very bad customer service experience at dinner on Saturday night, it struck me that customer service is even more important than ever in this era of social media and mobile technology.

With the growing popularity of smartphones combined with the massive increase in the use of social media (twitter, facebook etc), businesses really need to make sure they are up to scratch, otherwise they could see themselves splashed on the first page of a Google search for all the wrong reasons.

Recently released research from Nielsen shows that over 43% of online Australians now own a Smartphone (such as an iPhone or a Blackberry) and that mobile social networking has increased significantly in the last 12 months.  Nielsen’s report found that 26% of social networkers participated in mobile social networking in the past year. Facebook is the most popular social networking site accessed via a mobile (92% of mobile social networkers have visited Facebook), followed by YouTube and Twitter (18%).

However, more than half of Twitter’s mobile users visited the site daily, and 36% of Facebook mobiles users visit its site daily. And this doesn’t include the use of third party sites such as Twitterberry or Tweetdeck or any of the others available for mobile devices.

So as a business owner, think about what this means in terms of getting immediate feedback. While it’s great when you provide excellent service, think of the potential damage to your brand if your customers tweet about what they really think when you fail. Particularly if the person tweeting has a lot of followers.

When do you tweet about a good – or bad – experience?