Online Business Adviser

The Forum For Online Business Success

Every Saturday morning I take my son to his swimming lessons, which is truly one of the highlights of my week. My wife has deemed these weekend classes “dad soup”, because it seems this is the day when all the fathers are around to jump in the pool. Last weekend, I bumped into an old colleague who I had not seen in several years. We were Facebook “friends”, but in typical fashion, never really interacted much aside from the casual status “thumbs up”.

It was clear from the way the conversation went that he had been following what I was doing through my activity on Facebook. This gave us new things to talk about, particularly given I had done some work in his area of speciality, and it also led to the discussion of some potential contract work.

This is a great example of the intersection of social and real world networking, and the tremendous value of the latter.  Read more...

I’ve had some great feedback regarding my last post of 27 people who I derive value from on Twitter. Some of you left comments on the blog and I received a number of emails as well, and I want to thank all of you for your contribution to the conversation.

One of the themes that came up several times was around innovation, and why I didn’t single out anyone in my list as specifically innovative. I think the important thing to remember here is that the intention of the post was to list people that I derive the most value from. Certainly the list wasn’t exhaustive – there are a great many people that I get a lot from, but these people demonstrate consistent value.  Read more...

While there are some on Twitter who place value on the number of people they have following them, or that they follow, for me Twitter is about extracting the maximum value from a carefully selected group of selected people. Let’s face it, who has the time to trawl through tens of thousands of tweets to find something of interest?

I’m a big believer in getting the most out of your feed and rather than post multiple tweets about who you should follow on “Follow Friday”, I wanted to take the time to list them all and give a snapshot of who they are. When I was looking at this post, I thought of making it “50 people you should follow”. However, in the interests of reading time, and to make it just a little different, I have decided to make it 27 people you should follow. Obviously each niche in the online world will have their own rockstar tweeters, but as far as online business and marketing goes, these are the people whose tweets I derive the most value from (in no particular order).  Read more...

If you introduced yourself to someone at a party, how would you do it? How do you give someone you are just meeting an insight into you?

In this era of social networking, something that continually amazes me on Twitter is the way in which some people use their 160 character bio.

One of the biggest trends that I see amongst users is filling it with terms that relate to their niche, without any kind of “I offer”, or “I’m interested in” to preface it. Particularly in my niche I see 160 characters of Social Media, SEO, Affiliate Marketing – all the keywords to their business, jammed in there. It’s a practice akin to keyword stuffing in SEO. Then on the other end of the spectrum are those users who decide cryptic is the way to go, and only use a few words. Then, there are those that just don’t put anything. A  Read more...

Following on from my post about managing your online business reputation, I wanted to talk about using Twitter as a customer service tool, something that I experienced today.

This afternoon my internet connection died. Lights were on, no one was home. It wasn’t an issue with the computer, the modem, or the wireless router.

I called the Telstra technical support line and spent 20 minutes with an automated recording that was trying to talk me through resetting my equipment. Eventually I hung up and called the number that you use if you are calling from overseas, as I worked out that they put you straight through to a real person (an important tip for reputation management – there comes a point where customers don’t want to speak to a machine).  Read more...