It is now a lot easier for companies to communicate with their audiences on Linkedin whereas in the past you had to first “befriend” someone that works for the company before you can get acces sto any company information that is not available online. Now you have a direct line to companies. It is also easier for small business owners to reach their constituents who are active in the social space. Information dissemination has been made much easier as well, especially information targeted at a “switched-on” audience with a direct interest in a company’s products and services. It also makes it easier to keep tabs on your competitors.

Linkedin is also now a whole lot more social, with this added functionality that encourages and empowers two-way communication.

Life on Linkedin just got a whole lot more interesting.

1. Stay informed
People run companies and one of the ways we can stay effective in any position in business is to always learn new things, update ourselves with developments in our immediate and distant environment, industry and geographic location. Twitter is a great way to stay updated with what’s happening and you can do this simply by following people. You don’t have to tweet to learn on Twitter. The beauty of this is that you can also filter who you follow so that you don’t have to subject yourself to just any crap making its way into the Twittersphere. There is also the need to connect with like-minded minds, and this is made extremely easy on Twitter. Twitter satisfies a number of basic human needs, i.e to connect, to communicate, to learn and to share. Be human and tweet.

2. Brand Messaging
No business can survive without clients. And every client is a prospect before they eventually sign up for whatever you’re offering. And before any client signs up you have no idea whether they are a potential client or not until you reach out to them and communicate what you offer and they might need. Just like that you have no idea who on Twitter might need what you offer. So use Twitter as a messaging service to share what your company does, what your company’s about, who you sell to, who you buy from, who pisses you off, who makes you smile etc. It is through the messages that your company puts out into the ether – whether via advertising or otherwise – that people get to know what your company’s about before they make the decision to do business with you. Why not on Twitter as well?

3. Monitoring
With information on Twitter being generally honest, transparent and sometimes brutally so, Twitter is a great tool – perhaps the greatest – to find out more about your industry, your business environment, your product or service and perhaps even your company. Knowing what’s out there and the real-time nature of information on Twitter creates flexibility to manoeuvre and make powermoves that can save your company money, make your company money or just prevent mistakes that could be made had you not had access to such a rich, immediate source of information.

4. Traffic
Twitter can be used to send traffic to other online destinations, from where you can then send traffic to your products and services.. or you can send traffic directly there from Twitter. If you tweet good, valuable and useful content, chances are these tweets will be retweeted by others to their followings (which may be much larger than yours) and may even go viral.

There are a truckload more reasons I can spit at you right now, but I will stay with 4 for now. Twitter is a revolutionary communications tool and many downplay its effectiveness in business communication. So now that you’ve read what I have to say.. WHAT DO YOU THINK?

I have been let down by Amazon when I ordered 8 books on 2010 and only received 2, with no apology or explanation. Just a refund 4 months later. I have also been let down by Pick ‘n Pay in 2008 when I went to buy prepaid ADSL vouchers and the cashier told me – with a straight face – that they don’t sell Axxess vouchers. But today’s experience takes the cake and the party.

I was due to fly to Johannesburg in August to visit the Sign Africa exhibition and to meet a prospective business partner and a prospective client. So because of this I have been keeping tabs on the Velvet Sky website since early in July after I have been hearing radio ads claiming that the relatively new airline has tickets from Durban to Johannesburg available for as low as R200. After about 2 weeks of checking daily I gave up. They had no R200 tickets available. Long story short, I never went to Jozi due to business in Durban intensifying. But I was still disappointed that what I heard on radio and what I found on their website was not the same thing.

So this morning I logged what you see in the above image on the Velvet Sky Facebook Page – located at http://on.fb.me/pBn8hU and to my amazement not even 3 minutes later the post was “hidden” (yes you can hide posts you don’t want seen on your page if you’re the administrator of the page). They bloody took my post – a genuine concern I raised in the interest of people like myself that fly at least once a month – and removed it from where it cannot be seen by “the public”, despite the fact that they willingly chose to position themselves on this public digital playground called Facebook. My enquiry read as follows:

“I wanted to fly to Jozi from Durban on 24 August 2011 and I had a look at your prices in July 2011 already. There were no R200 tickets available (even closer to the date), yet your ads on Hindvani FM said “Fly from Durban to Johannesburg for as little as R200″. Explain?”

I could not believe what I saw. So the first question that popped up in my head was: “Why the dickens does Velvet Sky play in the social media space if they cannot hang with criticism and having their dirty laundry aired in public?”. Somebody over at the airline need to sign up for The Social Media Starter Pack.. cos they’re clearly clueless.

PS. JUST AN OBSERVATION AFTER I HAD A CLOSER LOOK AT THE VELVET SKY FACEBOOK PAGE. NOT A SINGLE CONVERSATION. JUST A WHOLE LOT OF SHOUTING ABOUT THEIR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES. THEY RESPOND TO NOBODY.

You see social media is THEEEE most dynamic and evolutionary of all media channels and platforms. Whatever is hip today may evolve tomorrow through the introduction of a plugin or a complementary application, rendering what you learnt today futile. And so there will always be new applications introduced. Just today I started using Twylah – a new application that creates branded pages with your tweets. Just this past Friday I had no idea Twylah existed. Such is the nature of social media dear friends.

So where was I again..? Oh yeah. On Monday 29 August 2011 we will be launching The Social Media Starter Pack. This is an interactive online course in the basics and the fundamentals of Social Media. We will start right at the beginning, l-o-o-o-n-g before you follow the first person on Twitter or make your first Facebook friend (for those fortunate enough to still have their individuality intact). We’ll start in the “Garden of Eden” of Social Media, and systematically take students through the foundations, laying your first few bricks for the walls, building and fortifying and eventually the roof, i.e how they all work together as one massive brand catalyst. What’s great about the course is that it will be facilitated using the very platforms we will teach you about. There are no physical classes or timetables that you have to adhere to. You learn at your own pace and have access to your facilitator at all times – via the social networks we will teach you about. So in essence this is a course about social media that you will learn using social media. The course is 6 months long, of which 3 months will be spent learning how the tools work and the remainder actually applying what you learnt in real world branding, marketing or promotion. There will be no tests and assignments – as you know it, however you will be scored on the Google CV you manage to put together over the duration of the course having used nothing but what you learnt in the course.

We have already signed up individuals that were close enough to the agency to know about the course. We’ve also just signed up the entire staff component of a small import/export company too.. and guess what? They’ve all paid their deposits already. So we believe there is a hunger for this information and know-how out there. We aim to sign up 50 people a week in month 1 and a further 400 by month 2. We’ll also be doing free talks and free one-day workshops on The Social Media Starter Pack, but these will merely serve as introductions to the actual course.

So if you feel you can benefit from what our agency’s about to launch, get cracking right now and make contact with us by clicking HERE.

Long story short, I ran that community for 3 years – completely on email – and even managed to monetise it just before I packed up and left Cape Town to come and settle here in Durban. Running URBANTAINMENT (which was technically an email marketing company than a community) and sending bulk emails across South Africa every Friday is the reason why I my faith in email marketing remain unshaken. It’s also the reason why I believe that email marketing has yet to be knocked off its spot as the marketing top dog – despite the arrival and phenomenal success of social media as a marketing tool.

That is so for several reasons. Here are a few of those reasons:

• Whether we admit this or not but those Facebook inbox messages and LinkedIn messages are actually email. What this says is that email is actually an integral part of social networking, whilst social networking doesn’t really play the same role in email marketing.
• Email is the most narrowly targeted and personalised communication there is in media and marketing. Next to word of mouth email ranks right up there the best of them as far as targeted marketing solutions go. Even in mass email marketing or sending bulk emails, if it’s via opt-in lists it hits the target spot on everytime. In the social space and especially on Facebook and Twitter you build large followings but never really know who reads your communication if no one responds.
• Email is already part of everyday business communication. Social media plays a very important role in relationship building and establishing trust, but it is far from being as integral a part of business as email is. So if we’re really honest (and I’m kinda sad to admit this) we’ll admit that business need email more than it does social media.
• Another shocking revelation would be that email cost a lot less than social media in time and money investment
• Thanks to the trusted inbox, email has a longer lifespan than social media updates. Your follower count and their update frequency in the social space determines how long information stays above the fold, in your face and therefore relevant . In short, each email message communicated via mass email marketing reaches only one individual but has a longer lifespan.
• Email marketing is by far the most private of all communication and marketing channels. Compare this to social networks where most of what is communicated is available for all to see. This can be good in that it reaches eyeballs, but bad in that they eyeballs might not be the ones you’re targeting. With email and especially bulk email via opt-in, you can be sure that the target is the one that requested to be emailed.

So there. Don’t get it twisted now. I’m a brand evangelist and a host of my clients have strong presences in the social space. I also speak at events about the “greatness” of social media as a marketing tool. However this in no way negates the effectiveness of email as a marketing tool that not only complements social media, but one that’s not diminishing in relevance and importance anytime soon.

So in my quest to find out how people “judge” whom they should follow, I decoded to ask around and came up with the following:

• Avatar. Yes some judge you by your Twitter avatar. I’m not entirely sure what it should look like, but hey – to each his own.
• Tweet frequency. A good number of those that responded to me say they look at how frequently you tweet.
• Following. Yes a great many judge people they believe they could follow by how many others are already following them.
• The Bio. The greater majority believes that a bio that makes sense is the major indicator of someone’s follow-ability

I’m definitely nothing like most of the people that responded to me. Firstly I have seen some very interesting tweets come from people with “eggs” (the avatar that does not yet have a custom image assigned to it). I’ve also seen people with great avatars and superbly concocted bios tweet nothing but “bulltwang”. The tweet frequency preference had me in stictches cos I have – right now – in my stream people who just tweet and tweet. I also have one particular person who just quote and quote every famous person that ever lived. Then there are the chronic retweeters. All of them extremely irritating. A great mass of followers also doesn’t say anything really. Right here in South Africa we have a social media marketing consultant who just quote Seth Godin and Brian Solis ad nauseum. All their other tweets are either Mashable or Techcrunch page links. How tweeting other people’s content all day every day is social media is beyond me. And the bio.. oh the bio. Beware of the bio. Network marketers use that as bait to attempt making genuine connections with the actual intention of thicklayering their downline.

So if you can’t trust a well-written bio, a hoard of followers, someone who just tweets and tweets or someone with a great avatar, what do you really look for when you decide whom to follow on Twitter? I do not have the answer, which is why my mantra on Twitter is to “follow everybody until they give you a reason to unfollow”.

How do you judge whom to follow and whom not?