Business Insight Zone

Last week I talked about how to find relevant people to follow on Twitter. I promised to follow up with a post on persuading the new people you follow to follow you back. What with one thing and another, I kept posting on other topics.

And then my friend Chris Brogan — one of the top users of Twitter — beat me to the punch:

Get More Twitter Followers TODAY

Chris’s take is delightfully tongue-in-cheek because, like me, he rejects the spammy, automated methods of adding followers on Twitter. (But note that his advice in the post is completely legitimate.) Chris is a model of how to attract more followers, not by any tricks, but by . . . wait for it . . . providing value.

Simple, huh?

Chris has drawn a Twitter audience of more than 90,000 the old-fashioned way, by:

• talking with them,
• talking about things they’re interested in, and
• giving them something to talk about.

Why people think this should be any different than the rest of the business / media / social / human world is beyond me. Which people make lots of friends? Which companies earn lots of customers? Sure, there are outliers, but for the most part it’s those who bring something good to the table, who make it easy for you to communicate with them, and who are interested in knowing more about your needs and interests and desires.

Setting aside those already famous from other media (Ashton Kutcher, Ellen DeGeneres, Shaquille O’Neal), I would summarize the habits of the best, most-followed tweeters thus:

1. They tweet regularly, with a good signal-to-noise ratio. You don’t have to put up with a lot of junk from them while you’re waiting for the good stuff.
2. They’re interactive — i.e. they have conversations via Twitter rather than just broadcasting.
3. They build audiences across media. E.g. lots of good bloggers (Dave Winer, John Scalzi, Erin Kotecki Vest) build Twitter audiences that overlap significantly with their blog audiences, and some writers prominent from books and magazines (Neil Gaiman, Harlan Coben, Peter King) do the same. (Come to think of it, we don’t need to set aside Ashton, Ellen, and Shaq — they just started via broadcast instead of print.)
4. Other users like what these folks tweet enough to recommend them, either explicitly (e.g. via FollowFriday mentions or by recommending something they wrote) or implicitly (e.g. by retweeting their tweets).

That’s what’s worked for others I’ve seen, and in my own humble way, it’s what has worked for me as I’ve steered the @Hoovers Twitter account past 4,000 followers (and my my personal account past 2,600).

Legitimate businesspeople don’t expect to buy a successful business out of a box and then just catch the money that rains from the sky. Why would doing business on Twitter be any different?

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Photo by Cindy McCravey.

When Twitter is down — as it is this morning — it’s a good reminder that you shouldn’t rely too much on a single service you never paid for to deliver business results forever and ever.

Clearly, the same lesson applies to Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.

(Be aware of the prevalence of R-rated language on the funny site When Twitter Is Down, from which the quote above is taken.)

Addendum: More details on the Twitter outage — it’s a denial-of-service attack — from TechCrunch.

If you care at all about customer service — and you should — read this post from my friend Russ Somers:

Customer Satisfaction Isn’t a Nastysickle

As if the post didn’t deliver enough goodness, Russ nails down a point in the comment thread that many companies would be wise to grasp:

Some companies (Zappos and Southwest come to mind) have employees who seem to have more good days than employees at other companies. If you view customer service as a competitive advantage, suddenly you start to manage your business to give your employees more good days than bad.

This ties back to something that Tom Peters has said over and over: if you want to stand out in your market — any market — you must empower the people who serve the customer.

For a long while, too many companies have gotten by on financial and operational engineering instead, focusing on numbers (which is important) to the exclusion of the people their companies employ and serve (which is inexcusable).

Here’s hoping that the current downturn sparks a renaissance in employee satisfaction driving customer satisfaction.

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Photo by Kathy Mackey.

Let’s start with the moral of the story: If you want someone to take a particular action, remove friction everywhere along the way.

It applies to sales cycles. It applies to getting someone to go on a date with you. It applies all over the place. But in this particular case, the idea came to me because of an exchange I had this week on Twitter. (Don’t worry, you’ll get the point even if you’ve never used Twitter.)

Context: If you write something useful on Twitter, you might see it “re-tweeted.” That’s when I read your tweet and then send a copy of it along to my followers, with due credit to you. (This is easier than it sounds — it’s one click of a button using tools like TweetDeck or Seesmic.)

The other day I passed along a basic piece of advice: if you want people to re-tweet something you write, keep in short in the first place, because whatever you say will now be prefaced by “RT @YourNameHere,” and you only had 140 characters to work with in the first place.

One Twitter correspondent pointed out that there are tools that will shorten tweets for you automatically. These mk yr tweets luk like lyrix 2 a Prince song. Personally, I’m enough of a wordsmith (read: writing snob) that I don’t like to write or read messages is l33t-speak, but the underlying lesson about friction goes way beyond my grammatical elitism.

Here’s the exchange I had with my Twitter interlocutor:

Me: Sure, somebody *could* abbreviate to [re-tweet] (automatically or manually) — but why make it hard for them?

Her: That’s hard?

Me: No, it’s not hard, but *any* friction in [the] process makes it less likely you’ll be retweeted.

How do I know this? Because I’ve bailed out on re-tweeting something interesting if it looked like it would take more than a few seconds.

Let’s review that for a second. I’m a pretty fast typist, I’ve sent more than 20,000 tweets over the past couple of years, and I have access to all the technology I need to make sending tweets really easy. Oh, and I’ve been a professional writer for many years. And yet I still bail out when something I thought would be really easy turns out to be less-than-really-easy, even when it would take, what?, 30 seconds of work.

Again, the lesson: remove friction.

Somewhere or other — sorry that I couldn’t find the reference — Paul Graham has written about his early days of building his Web startup Viaweb. There was a setup process for new users. Too many of them were bailing out. From looking at the stream of clicks users were making, page by page, Graham figured out exactly where they were bailing out most, and he had a good guess as to why. He simplified that page, made the navigation clearer, and even inserted a message that told them they only had a couple of steps to go in the process. The abandonment rate plummeted.

It’s a simple concept. People are busy. They don’t know what they want, and they believe they don’t have time to figure it out, especially if the figuring looks remotely like it will be laborious.

So remove the labor. Loosen the brakes. Eliminate friction.

What’s your best example of business friction?

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Image source: Richard Masoner. Used under a CC-Share Alike license.

*For the quaint notion of “desk,” read “desk or inbox or Twitter stream or browser tabs or voicemail or . . .” — you get the idea.

It seems like more crosses my desk every day — more messages, more opportunities, more things to read, more chances to buy, more everything.

But many of the messages don’t deserve an answer. Many of those opportunities would be foolish for me to take. I can’t read most of what comes my way, much less all of it. Budgets are under tighter scrutiny than ever, so I buy much more carefully. And the sum total of the everything that crosses my desk could easily keep me from ever getting another productive thing done.

So what do you do with the leftovers? And how can you benefit from the process of carving down the stack? Here are seven suggestions that work for me.

No. 1 — Open the door for somebody else. That thing that looks suspiciously like a waste of your time? It might be a fine opportunity for your lieutenant, or for the receptionist who’s shown an interest in taking on bigger responsibilities.

Or maybe it’s a fit for someone outside your company. Recently I had to turn down an invitation to speak at a conference because of a conflicting engagement. But I referred the organizer to a friend who’s perfect for the slot. I’m happy, the organizer’s happy, my friend’s happy.

No. 2 — Leave somebody with a good feeling about your company. Years ago I learned a great lesson from a Hoover’s sales rep who had mastered the art of saving everyone time. He had a knack for figuring out when our offerings didn’t fit the needs of the person on the other end of the phone, and then an amazing way of drawing the conversation to a close — but in such a good-humored, upbeat, and informative way that the prospect couldn’t help but have a positive image of Hoover’s. That rep got plenty of callbacks, six months or a year later, from former prospects whose needs or budgets had changed. They remembered him — and Hoover’s — because he had done right by them the first time around.

The moral of the story: Just because you have to say “No” doesn’t mean you have to sour people on your company.

No. 3 — Leave somebody with a good feeling about you personally. Without being smarmy about it, you should be building your career network all the time. So learn the skill of making a good impression on the person who’s just called or e-mailed you even when you can’t help them, don’t have what they need, or aren’t in the market for what they sell. A few courteous words might be all it takes to help that person remember you in the future — and who knows where your career will take you?

No. 4 — Practice exercising your priorities. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this post from Merlin Mann, in which he argues that “prioritizing” a to-do list really means “force-ranking” it . . . but doesn’t necessarily reflect our genuine priorities. Our genuine priorities are reflected in what we actually do, and the real way to “prioritize” our work (and our lives) is to think hard about what’s most important to us — and then just work on those few things.

The employee who can do that, be she a customer-service rep or a CIO, will soar. So as you stare down the pile of things on your desk, reflect on your real priorities, then use that reflection to help you hack through the cruft.

No. 5 — Practice saying “No” gracefully. Sometimes the answer is just plain No. This hurts to say, especially if you’re a “pleaser” who would much rather say yes. (Not that I would know anything about that, you understand.) But saying No is a vital skill if you want to get anywhere in your career — including getting to the back end of your to-do list with your sanity intact. Here are some honest phrasings that have helped me:

• “I’m tempted to say yes, because that seems like a great opportunity. But I have to be realistic, for both of our sakes: I’m already over my head with the projects I have, and I wouldn’t be able to give a solid effort to this one.”
• “Wow, I wish I could help you with that — it sounds nifty. Unfortunately, I can’t. Good luck!”
• “I’ve promised myself I won’t take on even one more thing until I finish these two big projects that have been taking up too much of my plate, and I’m at least [several days, three months, a year, etc.] from achieving that.”

Occasionally, you’ll get somebody who will really push — who thinks that their persistence will be rewarded when you cave and agree to serve on the nominating committee or whatever. That’s when you pull out the trump card:

• “Believe me, I would like to. But let me save us both some time: there’s just no way I’m going to be able to do this.”

No. 6 — Practice using “soft power” within your organization. Sometimes, you realize that Project X, while seen as important to someone in your company, really doesn’t pass muster in your own list of priority activities. Whether the pressure is coming from your boss, your teammates, another department, or wherever, this is a chance to exercise your skills of persuasion and diplomacy.

• Can you negotiate a better timeline for the project?
• Can you hand it off to someone better suited for it? In particular, can you send it right back where it came from, to the person who should have been responsible for it in the first place?
• Can you give a candid, off-the-record opinion that will (a) help the other person respect your honesty and (b) save the company from wasting resources on Project X?
• Can you improve the feedback loop between you and your boss?
• Can you arrange a truce between Department A and Department B, using Project X as a focal point for discussions?

No. 7 — Repurpose across social media. The beauty of  blogs, tumblogs, Twitter, Facebook, forums, etc. is that you can share material without passing judgment on it. Heck, if you show a little judgment you can share it before you’ve even read it: I often post tweets that say “Reading: Article X” with a link to the article. So even if I end up reading the first two paragraphs and skimming the rest, others can latch onto the story if it interests them.

What’s amazing is how often something that I find only moderately interesting becomes a real topic of conversation for others. The same thing has happened when I’ve shied away from reading something interesting-but-extraneous: I tweet “Looks interesting: Essay Y” . . . and the next thing you know, others are thanking me for pointing it out to them. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and all that.

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These are some of the methods I’ve used over the years to derive value not just from the good things and high priorities on my desk, but even from the process of clearing off the detritus around them.

Now, please share your wisdom: What’s No. 8?

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Photo by Sharon Mollerus.

Inquiring minds — i.e. we — want to know.

Thanks!

How does this build value for the enterprise?

Told you it was simple.

How brave will you be today in applying this question to everything?