Tip 1: Follow the “smores (social media whores*).” They are the folks with large number of followers and seem to be the opinion leaders (and perhaps even “heros”) of Twitter. You can get a good idea of who they are by viewing Twitterati.alltop, TwitterCounter, and Egos.alltop. There are three reasons to follow them: first, many have scripts that will auto follow you; second, you might learn something from watching what they tweet about; third, when people look at your profile to see who you follow, you want to appear that you have a clue. (*originally coined by @worleygirl who passed it to @pauladrum who passed it to me)

Tip 2: Send @ messages to the smores. They probably won’t answer you, but that’s okay. All you want to do is appear like you have a relationship with them to enhance your credibility. The theory is, “If she is tweeting with @scobleizeer, she must be worth following.” Bull shiitake logic, admittedly, but it helps. To bastardize what a famous PR person once told me, “It’s not who you know. It’s who appears to know you.”

Tip 3: Create an effective avatar. Your avatar is a window into your soul, so you need to create one that doesn’t look like you shot it with a camera phone while you were drunk. In most cases, use a simple, informal straight-up photo of just your face—not you and your dog, car, kids, or surfboard. Increase the exposure to brighter than you think it should be. Fix the red-eye. Crop the photo because Twitter is going to display it as a postage-stamp size image. If you can’t fix up your photo, send it to Fixmyphotos. Upload a large version of it (approximately 500 x 500 pixels) and let Twitter scale it down, so that when people zoom on your photo, they can see your gorgeousness and not an ugly pixelated image.

If you have access to cool image tools, then create an avatar that raises the question, “How did he do that?” (That’s the category I think my current avatar is in.) If you represent a company, then use its logo—but this is boring (sorry, Tony). Avatars with cleavage may help you get followers that you wouldn’t want, but that’s your call. Bottom line: When people view a stream of tweets, your avatar (and therefore your tweet) should stand out.

Tip 4: Follow everyone who follows you. When I first started on Twitter, Robert Scoble told me to follow everyone who followed me. “But why, Robert, would I follow everyone like that?” The answer is that it’s courteous to do so and because when you do, some people will respond to you and eveyone who follows them will see this—which is more exposure for you.

Having said this, when you get to more than fifty or so followers, it’s impossible to read what all your followers tweet. At that point, you have to focus on direct private messages (“Ds”) and direct public messages (“@s””).

Tip 5: Always be linking. The fact that your cat rolled over or your flight is delayed isn’t interesting, so get outside of your mundanity and link to interesting stories and pictures—you should think of yourself as a one-person StumbleUpon. The Twitter pickup artist’s mantra is ABL (“Always Be Linking”).

Fortunately, you don’t have to find these sites by yourself because there are companies and communities who are dedicated to this task. Here are my best sources.

1. StumbleUpon. People in the StumbleUpon community mark sites that they find interesting. You can install the StumbleUpon button by clicking here and go from site to site; you can visit the StumbleUpon recently popular websites list; or you can add this feed to your feed reader. Sample picture.
2. Alltop. If you’ve ever seen me post ten tweets in a row with links to (what I consider) interesting sites, it’s because I’m parked in front of these four Alltop sites: Psychology.alltop, Science.alltop, Lifehacks.alltop, and SocialMedia.alltop. At any of these sites you can scan hundreds of stories at a time and pick off the ones that will attact followers. (Disclosure: I am co-founder of the site).
3. CNN. CNN is hard to beat for up-to-the minute news. You’ll be competing with CNN’s own tweets which has 52,000 followers as of today, but still leaves you about five million other Twitter users to attract. Seriously, you can attract followers just by cherrypicking the best of CNN stores. To do this, you need immediate notification of breaking news, and CNN’s email alerts are as good as it gets. Click here to sign up. This is its recent stories RSS feed, but email notification is faster and therefore better for the purpose of attracting followers. Sample: “Monks Brawl Before Religious Holiday.”
4. New York Times. Like CNN, the New York Times is a lovely source for links because it provides both up-to-the minute news as well as carefully crafted, intellectual stories. This is its home page RSS feed. You can also pick from a bunch of feeds here. You and your readers do have to register, but it’s worth it— perhaps the only site that is worth registering for on the Internet. Sample: “A Political Manners Manual.”
5. Buzzfeed. Buzzfeed is a also a community of people looking for interesting stuff. You can visit its home page to find stuff or subscribe to its RSS feed. Samples: “Lunch Bag Art” and “Young People Love Obama.”
6. Truemors. This is the much criticized site that I started a while ago. I’ve subsequently sold the site to NowPublic. Like it or not, the stories at Truemors are carefully selected and highly edited. The woman behind Truemors, Annie Colbert, is an extremely good writer and editor. Its feed is here. Sample: “Facebook Tops BBC in UK Traffic.”
7. Newswise. Newswise is “a trusted resource for knowledge-based news, embargoed research results, and expert contacts from the world’s leading research institutions: universities, colleges, laboratories, professional organizations, governmental agencies, and private research groups active in the fields of medicine, science, business, and the humanities.” Holy kaw! In other words, it features hardcore science. Some stories are embargoed and you have to register to prove you’re a journalist for them, but even the stuff that’s not embargoed is very good. Its RSS feed is here. Sample: “New Generator Produces AC Current by Stretching Wires.”
8. ZDNet. If you want to push out info-tech links for nerds and geeks, it’s hard to beat ZDNet. Just about every day there’s some story that will interest the 95% of the world that uses Windows. ZDNet pushes out email notification here, and its RSS feed is here. Sample: “In Depth Look at Windows 7.”
9. Digg. Many people think that Digg is a good place to find stuff that approximately 100 forty-year old men living with their parents find interesting. I don’t use it very often because that’s not who I’m trying to pick up, but you can find many few gems there. Its main RSS feed is here, and you can find specialized feeds here. Sample: “Gears of War 2 sells 2.1 million copies on day 1.”
10. Kirtsy. Kirtsy on the other hand is “Digg for chicks.” It’s a social networking site where women post and rate stories. The stories here range from mommy/homey stuff to “Liz Hurley’s Boobs: They’re Real and They’re Fantastic” (I’m not making this up). Its links are particularly effective to attract female followers and sensitive men (oxymoron?). Its RSS feed is here. Sample: “5 Jobs You Wanted as a Kid (And Why They Suck).”
11. Techmeme. Techmeme makes no bones about it: it uses technology to find the hottest tech stories. It’s a community of one: Gabe Rivera, and he’s a good guy. Where ZDNet usually contains ITish stories, Techmeme casts a bigger net for anything tech. Its feed is here. Sample: “Google CEO on Obama Tech Czar Job: No Thanks”.

Bonus: Rewrite the headline. Here’s a power tip for you. The most powerful way to start a headline on Twitter is with the words such as ”How to… ” and “Why… ,” so don’t hesitate to blow out the existing headline and rewrite it to make it more interesting and relevant to the kind of followers you seek.

Double Bonus: Scan Goodtweet.alltop. To make it easier for you to scan the best sites for interesting links, we created Goodtweet.alltop. It aggregates the the feeds mentioned above plus my favorites from the various Alltop sites to make life even easier for you.

Tip 6: Establish yourself as a subject expert. One thing is for sure about Twitter: there are some people interested in every subject and every side of every subject. By establishing yourself as a subject expert, you will make yourself interesting to some subset of people.

Step 1 is to actually be an expert—but that’s beyond the scope of this posting. Step 2 is to find tweets that you can supplement (I explain how to find these tweets below in the TweetDeck and Twellow sections in Tip 8). Example 1: you’re an expert on Macintosh. Search for “Macintosh” and answer people’s questions. Example 2: you’re an expert in public speaking. Search for “Powerpoint,” “keynote,” and “speech” to add value to tweets. People are likely to not only follow you, but also retweet your posts and therefore give you additional exposure.

And if/when you are an expert, don’t be afraid to express your opinion. It’s better that some people follow you and some people refuse to follow you than no one knows who you are at all. There are so many people on Twitter that some are likely to agree with you.

Tip 7: Incorporate pictures and other media. Who can resist a tweet such as “Picture of my new puppy”? Nobody, that’s who. And your topic doesn’t have to be anything as sweet as a puppy. I’ve tweeted pictures of shower heads from Microsoft in the Singapore Airlines lounge, the world’s longest toilet flush, and two sacred cows in Mumbai to get followers, so I know multimedia works. The key is the tweet leading to the picture. Stuff like ““If Microsoft made shower heads,” “World’s longest toilet flush,” and “two sacred kaws/cows” works. (See reference to Posterous below to see how I post pictures and video.)

Tip 8: Use the right tools. At the end of the day, you either have many followers or you don’t. A good effort doesn’t count, so you might as well use the right tools to make picking up followers as easy as possible.

(This is a such a large and important slice of managing Twitter, I’m giving it it’s own post at Twitter Tools.)  But it’s critical to know and use these, so be sure to go there.)

Tip 9: Repeat your tweets. Try this experiment: take your most interesting tweets (as measured by how many people retweet them, perhaps) and post them again three times, eight to twelve hours apart. I used to think that people would complain about repeating tweets, but I’ve never had a complaint. My theory is that the volume of tweets is so high and most people check in at about the same time every day, so people don’t notice repeat tweets.

Tip 10: Ask people to follow. That’s right just come right out and ask them to follow you. For example, I’m here if you want to follow me.

So now you’re on the road to being a Twitter celeb.  And Kawasaki’s final words of advice are:

“Always be linking.”

Tina Forsyth is the person who really crystalized this concept in her new book, Becoming an Online Business Manager.

Tina describes a situation in which business owners “already have teams of virtual assistants, webmasters, designers and other contractors, but what they really need is someone to manage all of this; to play a bigger role in their business so that they can grow to the next level.”
Now, as online businesses have grown and increased in complexity, with more sophisticated online tools available, Tina says she is “seeing more business owners who are ready to hire at the management level.”

When I started reading Tina’s writing, it was with a mild shock of recognition I realized I had been doing what she described for a number of clients for some time. Since I had operated a major website since 1996, I had ample experience on the web, so a number of businesses and organizations I had come into the same orbit with had asked for me to help them set up shop online.  What happened, in every case, was that I was not just setting up or overseeing the set up of a website and collaborative and marketing tools, but helping them think through the business processes they would need to succeed and grow their businesses. It was a collaboration where I implemented their vision, more like a doctor collaborating with a patient, to diagnose the state of his or her health, determine the level he or she really aspired to reach, then prescribing a regimen for increased fitness to ultimately reach that goal.  The actual construction of the website was more like being the pharmacist dispensing the medicine.

Why Aren’t More People Hiring Online Business Managers?

First of all, they don’t know such people exist.  I didn’t.  And I was one.  I just hadn’t realized it. Tina says:

“For business owners, it is a matter of not knowing who or what they are really looking for. They may have a faint idea they could benefit from hiring someone to help them manage and grow their business online, but they often have no clue what that role looks like. They aren’t clear themselves on what it is they need, which of course makes it quite hard to find someone! Quite often, when we describe the role of an oBM to the business owners we speak to, we hear, “yes! that’s exactly who I need on my team … now where do I find someone?” and that leads us to the other side of the gap, that there just aren’t a lot of people out there who are actively working as oBMs, consciously or unconsciously. So when these clients start looking to fill that role, they are having a tough time finding the person they need.”

Let’s start with a job description so we can learn a little more about what the job looks like.

A sample oBM job description from the book reads like this:
The Online Business Manager will:

Have 5+ years experience in one or more of:

• the fields of marketing, ecommerce, programming, coaching, business management, human resources, project management, personal development or other related area of study, or equivalent.
• Work with the very energetic CEO/Owner of the business to create new passive revenue streams, taking them from idea to sale
• Manage administration, logistics, human resources and infrastructure of a growing online business
• Recruit additional team members and train/manage them into their respective functions
• Be familiar with and/or practically experienced in all facets of Internet marketing including:
  • Product planning and research
  • Copywriting
  • Website design and creation
  • Creation of graphics and user interface
  • Product packaging
  • Traffic generation
  • Conversion and
  • The overall strategic marketing plan that creates a cohesive whole out of these elements
• Have experience creating and implementing a business plan in a competitive environment
• Be a relationship builder, client service oriented and a team player
• Understand advertising, affiliate programs and joint ventures; be able to hold and cultivate key relationships
• Diligently maintain and create a standard operating procedure or business training manual for the business
• Be fiscally responsible

So why isn’t it easy to find these people? Tina says:
“I believe that there are .. professionals out there who have the skills to be working as an oBM; they just haven’t realized that this opportunity exists… This way of working is still quite new to most people and because of that there is a gap between the business owners who are looking to hire oBMs and the people who could potentially be working for them in this role.”

In fact, I believe there are two levels of workers an online business owner can turn to. A good virtual assistant, or VA, with substantial experience could oversee the technical tools and processes and probably has some tricks up her sleeve about marketing tools which could help expand your business.  An online business manager would be a step up from that: someone who could analyze your business and its processes and collaborate with you to design the elements which would create more value and help you reach your goals.

So, if you’re Net savvy, there could be a job in here for you. Most small business owners, or growing organizations will definitely reach a point where they are either unable to handle all the tasks before them, or don’t have sufficient background and experience online to know how to proceed.  When that point comes, don’t hesitate, look for an online business manager.

Author: Gretchen Glasscock, AdvancingWomen.com