What is Twitter? – 10 Practical Uses

What is Twitter? – A website where people can leave 140 character posts (or “tweets) about themselves or their business/organization/cause. Here’s how it works.

• Your tweets – You tweet and have the option to have your tweets visible to anyone or just people you approve like your friends or colleagues.
• Follow others - You can follow others like politicians, celebrities, friends or causes. The tweets of all those you follow, show up in one list with the newest ones at the top. Remember other people can follow you too unless you change your settings to require you to approve followers.
• Public tweets – You can view the tweets of everyone who posts publicly on another list with the newest ones at the top.
• Tweets to one account – You can send tweets to a particular poster. This might be useful if you want to send a quick message that’s for a particular friend. Just put @poster and replace poster with the account name.

I’ve been reading about Twitter for quite some time now. Like most people, I tried it, didn’t get it and left initially. I didn’t understand what the big deal was. Well, I went back and now I see how it can be used effectively and ineffectively for the average user.

Important to note:  140 characters is not long, but don’t be surprised if a tweet includes a link to more in depth information, photos or videos.

10 Practical Uses of Twitter:

Find out when sales and deals are occurring at stores – If you like a particular store or brand, search for them on Twitter and follow them. You will now be one of the first to know about their promotions. The tweet may link to a coupon or more detailed webpage. Example: WestJet Airlines announces seat sales on Twitter to its followers.

Get current news – Stay on top of what’s happening in the news by following reporters/bloggers, newspapers, etc. They may link to a larger, more in depth article.

Follow celebrities to learn more about their daily life and whereabouts – If you’re in love with a celebrity or their work, you might find out where they’re filming. If you follow a celebrity you want to be like, maybe you’ll get some insight on what it’s like to be them. Some celebrities also give back to their fans like Shaquille O’Neal who tweeted that if anyone could tag him in the next 20 minutes (and he posted his location), they’d get 2 free tickets to a game.

Show your support for a politician – If a politician has inspired you or you just plain like their policies, you can follow them to learn where they’re speaking so you can show your support.

Follow a cause - You can follow an organization that supports a cause you believe in so you can find out about events and developments.

Tweet your unhappiness with a product and get help – You might be surprised that your cry for help might just get answered by a friendly stranger or a representative of the company. Some companies are now monitoring Twitter for mentions of their name.

Get quick answers to general questions - Sometimes if you post a question, you’ll get answers within minutes. For example:  “What’s the best website for buying shoes?”

Reach people who are usually hard to get in contact with – If you would like an answer from someone who is typically difficult to meet in person like a CEO of a big company or a celebrity, you can try tweeting to them. Some do reply back.

Give feedback to companies - Companies that have a Twitter account give their customers an outlet to praise their products/services or vent about bad experiences.

Ineffective, Annoying and Confusing Uses of Twitter:

People who are faking someone famous – Some people will pretend to be a celebrity or representative of a business. These people have way too much time on their hands, were offended in some way with whoever they are faking or think they’re funny (but aren’t really). Be weary of these people.

Automatic followers - Some people follow you for a good reason while others follow you for no reason. I understand that if you follow a person, some feel as a courtesy they should follow you back which is fine. However, some people followed me because they dug up my account from a list of followers of a particular person. I find this a bit disturbing. Thankfully, if you feel uncomfortable with a follower, you can block them.

People who spam – Yes, it’s possible to be spammed on Twitter. But, you can report the account to Twitter and block the spammer.

-Emily Hirai

E-Store Owners Can Save Time With These Keyboard Shortcuts

As an entrepreneur your time is precious, so every bit of time savings can make a difference. If you have an e-store, you’ve probably had the tedious task of editing, updating and posting your products to your site. What if you could save some time during the process? Instead of right-clicking and then selecting an option or having to click an icon somewhere on your screen, you can use these keyboard shortcuts:

Text Shortcuts:

CTRL + C – Copy whatever is highlighted
CTRL + V – Paste whatever you copied
CTRL + A – Highlight everything in the area you’re in (e.g. a text box, a whole page)
CTRL + Z – Undo whatever you just did
CTRL + B – Bold
CTRL + I – Italics

PhotoShop:

CTRL + Z – Undo/Redo last change
CTRL + ALT + Z – Undo multiple times
CTRL + = – Zoom in
CTRL + – - Zoom out

More PhotoShop keyboard shortcuts here and here

Browser Shortcuts:

CTRL + N – Opens a new browser window in the same browser session. What’s so great about this? Have you ever been editing a product, but needed to reference something somewhere else but you didn’t want to stop what you’re doing? Use this shortcut. The added benefit is if you’re using a do-it-yourself web builder, you will be logged in for both your windows (i.e. same browser session).

CTRL + F – Find. If you need to find a particular word in your text, use this shortcut. Works on pretty much all browsers and Microsoft Word.

-Emily Hirai

New Google Tool May Influence E-Store Search Result Clicks

Google has introduced a new tool called SearchWiki that will allow you to rearrange your personal search results and add comments to each result. According to Google, it will not influence the search results. However, I think it may influence what links are clicked because of the option to see everyone’s comments on the search results you’re viewing.

How it works is you log into your Google account and enter your search words like usual. Next, you’ll have the ability to drag and drop the various listings into whatever order you’ll like. This is beneficial if you do a search quite often to find a particular group of links. Also, by each link, you’ll be able to click a button to add a comment. Where I see some influence on what gets clicked is the ability to see everyone’s comments on links for the same search results.

If you have an e-store, you could end up with lots of positive comments that help bring more customers to your store. Fabulous! However, you could also have a few disgruntled customers leave awful comments about your business. From what I’ve seen, when someone is angry (whether right or wrong), there is a good chance they will write a lot and explain in detail why they’re upset. If you’re viewing results, a long comment with lots of ALL CAPS and “!!” will probably get a lot of attention. Hopefully the Google team will just keep the first few lines of the comment and then have a “read more” link at the end.

We’ll just have to wait and see how this tool works out. See the video from Google below for more info.

-Emily Hirai

10 Article Ideas for Blogs Driving Traffic to an E-Store

Here are some ideas on what kinds of topics you can do for a blog especially if you sell physical products in a niche market like toys, clothing, car parts, etc. We have been creating about 2 to 5 articles a week since June on a blog attached to a test e-store so that we can experience the same issues as our small business customers. It’s a niche market for Hello Kitty products (see House of Kitty Store and House of Kitty Blog).

Article Ideas for Blogs:

Talk about unique products in your niche – These are one of the easiest to write about and you have a nice picture too to go with your article. You can also include your own products as a featured unique item (see from your store statistics which product pages are most popular and feature those ones). However, I do recommend also including other products too so you don’t look like you’re obviously just pushing your own items. One great place to find unique items is Flickr.com. You can do an Advanced Search on Flickr and then choose “Only search within Creative Commons-licensed content.” Then, you’ll see photos which generally you can show on your blog so long as you link back to the photo page. If you see something great which isn’t covered by Creative Commons, simply send a message via Flickr to the photo owner and ask permission. From my experience, I’d say about 2/3 of people get back to you within 3 days with an ok.

Announce interesting events related to your niche – Conferences, trade shows, festivals, special speaker engagements or anything else where your customers could get something out of it are great to mention on your blog. As an expert in your field, you’ll have a good feel for what kind of events might be helpful and informative to your readers. If you’ve been to the event before, include any insights you have about it and any practical tips. For example, maybe you know that it’s better to go in the morning when it’s not as busy or that XYZ Company has an incredible presentation that shouldn’t be missed.

Report any news that might interest your readers – Regularly keep track of news in your industry and if you see something that your readers might want to know, write about it. You can also include your expert opinion. Anytime you show off knowledge in your industry, it had an extra benefit. It makes you feel more trustworthy and people are more likely to buy from someone they trust.

Do home projects that your customers may want to try – Some niches may have projects that can be done at home like a craft project, carpentry project (e.g. building a shelf), science project (e.g. building a small rocket), etc. If this fits your niche, go ahead and start that project and show the progress on your blog. Remember to take lots of pictures too. There are lots of project ideas online. Remember to link to the project outline so others can try the project too. They may just share the experience in the comments section of your blog.

Take ideas from special holidays – Can you showcase something related to an upcoming holiday like Halloween or Christmas? Keep in mind there are more people doing searches for words related to upcoming holidays so you may benefit from extra traffic.

Provide historical information about your niche – Depending on your niche, there may be a good story to tell about the origins of your industry. Who are the pioneers? How did it start? What is the inspiration behind your industry?

Use Wordtracker for article ideas – Wordtracker is a program which tells you how popular certain keywords are so you can find out what people are searching. It also does an analysis so you can see which keywords have less competition so you can get a good ranking for your article. Start by putting in a general term and then you’ll get suggestions for more specific terms. I used this a few times to find out what’s popular in the industry and then I made sure to include the keyword terms a few times in my article.

Run a contest on your blog – You can give away a promotion code or prize through a contest. We ran a contest for a prize pack worth over $50. Bloggers simply had to contact us and then we gave them a promotion code to announce to their readers. Whoever made the most sales got the prize. You can try lots of different contests. If you can think of a way to encourage people to link to you, that’s even better. Getting people to link to you will help increase your blog’s ranking on search engines.

Get ideas from your readers – Encourage your readers to give you article ideas or submit photos to you. On our Hello Kitty blog, we tell our readers that if we publish their photo, they get a promotion code for 10% off at our store. When people work for a promotion code, they’re also more likely to buy.

Report product sightings – Some of our most popular blog articles are the ones where we go to a store and take tons of pictures of Hello Kitty products. You can then give your opinion of the items and post all the pictures. Make sure to include where you took the pictures. We’ve had a few people mention they went to the store later to buy something they saw in our blog.

Remember all your blog entries will stay in the search engines so the longer you blog, the more links you’ll have listed. We started blogging in June of this year for our Hello Kitty e-Store at www.houseofkittyblog.com and have published 75 articles. When we’re doing research for article ideas, we run into our own blog a lot and often it’s on the first page.

Good luck blogging!

-Emily Hirai

Defeating Office Politics

Our CEO Sunny can’t stand office politics and he has used some traditional and some innovative techniques to keep us a happy healthy company family.

Hire team oriented people with the right skills – It all starts with who you bring into your company. Most of our employees go through a regular interview and to ensure they have the proper skill level, some kind of practical test. The regular interview gives us a gut feel on whether this person will fit in with the personality of our company. The skills test is really important too because if someone can’t do the job, they’ll cause stress with other employees.

Have an open door policy – Everyone including the CEO will talk to any employee about any issue, idea or observation relating to the company without an appointment. This also includes outside issues that affects an employee’s ability to concentrate at work. Rather than let a problem simmer, they can be dealt with quickly. If you’re concerned that your ideas aren’t being heard, you can talk about it to your supervisor or someone higher up.

Share and increase employee knowledge – Office politics can come about when people hoard their knowledge. At With.Us, we are encouraged to work as a team with everyone driving toward the same goal. The feeling in the company is the smarter and better skilled our employees, the more successful the company will be. Everyone also has equal access to increase their knowledge through an unlimited book budget and the option to take classes.

Create social events where employees get to know each other – Office politics are often the result of misunderstandings and mistrust, but you can lower this by getting employees to get to know each other better. Every Friday the company treats the employees to lunch and we all eat together. The last hour of every Friday is also game time at our office. We play board games or video games where we can all play together. When your company gets bigger, it’s especially important to let departments mix together as there’s less one on one communication between people in different areas of the company.

Emphasize the importance of each member of your company – Tension can be the result of someone believing they’re more important than another employee. Sunny makes it clear how much he values each individual. Even at our year end dinner, we traditionally sit at one table no matter how big we get. Additionally, we show the value of employees by getting together for something called “Brags” on Fridays. This is a chance for each employee to point out the great contributions of other employees and managers.

Hopefully, you’ll use some of these ideas or it will inspire you to come up with your own ideas. Most of us have worked at places where office politics were an extra stress that frankly no one needed. As an owner of your own business, this is your chance to make your employees feel special, appreciated and happy.

Increasing Traffic to Your E-Store in Small Steps

Some With.Us staff are running a Hello Kitty e-store to experience the same problems our customers face. Here’s their story.

I once read that doing a lot of little things adds up to big sales. We’ve been experimenting with a few different tactics to attract more hits to our Hello Kitty experimental e-store. Here’s what we’ve done so far:

Pay Per Click – Google Adwords is the best known pay per click system. You only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad. Make sure you properly cap how much you’re willing to spend as it can get very expensive. Also, read up on the various Google Adwords tactics like “exact match” and capitalization of your domain (e.g. www.HouseOfKitty.com instead of www.houseofkitty.com) to increase clicks. The other huge benefit of Adwords is you get in depth statistics on how your ads are doing. It’s a great way to get feedback in a few days of what is working and not working.

Search Engines – Submit your site to the major search engines and in particular Google, Yahoo!, MSN, dmoz.org and Ask.com. Then, submit to local regional directories and industry directories. Even the small ones when put together can give you significant traffic. Also, these smaller directories are usually free anyways so spend a couple minutes to submit to each one. We got about 43% more traffic than the previous month by submitting to some smaller directories.

Blog - Many forward thinking internet gurus see blogs as the new way to get more business to a site. You essentially blog your expertise and not your sales pitch. If people see that you are knowledgeable in your industry, they trust you more. A side effect is you can build up really great traffic, better link ins and higher search engine ranking on your blog (as long as you update regularly like once or twice a week). You then include a link to your store, so if anyone happens to want to buy from you, they easily can. About 9 to 10 percent of our store traffic comes from our Hello Kitty Blog.

Get Sites to Link to You – If you do have a blog, one fast way to get links is to simply post on other blogs and leave a link back to your site. You can also invite others to link to you. You may want to offer something they want in exchange like a discount off products, a link back, a mention in your blog, etc. We ran a contest where blogs mention in any way they wish (we provided a picture too) a special discount code and the blogger with the most sales generated wins a Hello Kitty gift package worth over $50. Our traffic bumped up about 50% from the previous month.

Doing lots of different tactics is great, but don’t forget to track it all. If you already have a tracking system that’s terrific. If you don’t, just sign up for Google Analytics which is free. You then just have to insert a small snippet of code at the bottom of your pages.

-Emily Hirai

Hiring from a Small Talent Pool

If you’re in an industry where there aren’t many people who have the skills you need, you may have a tough time hiring. This is exactly what happened at With.Us but we have finally been able to find 3 talented Ruby programmers. It “only” took us 5 months. What do you do when there’s such a small pool of talent?

Here’s what we did in chronological order:

Advertise the job on popular job boards – We love Monster.com which not only allows you to post your job, but you can arrange to have access to posted resumes in your job field. Sometimes you have to go after the talent and not just wait for them to come to you. It’s a few hundred dollars though. Your local CraigsList.com site is also a great place to attract people and it’s free.

Look for job boards specific to your industry - We posted on 5 technology related boards including a couple which were specific to Ruby.

Go to industry meet ups – Our CEO Sunny and a few programmers went to our local Ruby meet up group to spread word that we’re looking for Ruby programmers. Sunny also made an announcement at the meet up to garner attention.

Increase your profile at industry meet ups – Sunny did an extensive interview about Ruby Programming that was posted on the Ruby meet up site. Then, he did a presentation about Ruby at one of the meet ups. At this point, Sunny and the company had a great reputation with the club.

Lastly, regardless of where or how you advertise, sometimes you have to hire outside of your country. We found an exceptional programmer this way and are currently in the process of getting him a work visa.

-Emily Hirai

CEO Speaks at Vancouver Ruby/Rails September Meetup

Our CEO Sunny Hirai spoke at the Vancouver Ruby/Rails September 8th Meetup about New Ruby Patterns. There was a big turnout of 43 programmers which is almost double the usual number of programmers. He also was interviewed about programming and how to roll out a high-traffic, high-speed web framework which was published in 3 installments.

Why is this important? When we release the With.Us software programs, you’ll be happy to know that our CEO is incredibly well-rounded when it comes to understanding customers’ needs. Sunny is not only a programmer, he graduated in business/entrepreneurship and he is also a graphics designer.

What Customers Want to See on an “About Us” Page

The “About Us” page is an important page to build trust with new customers. In particular, if you have a small business, people are less likely to hand over their credit card information to you unless they are reassured you are a real business with a physical location, good reputation and history. Here are more specifics:

• Physical Address – Display your street address and if you have a store, a picture of your store adds extra assurance that your business exists in the real world.

• Contact Information – Customers feel better when they see your phone number, fax number and e-mail address. They want know that if anything goes wrong, they can get a hold of you.

• People – A website can be impersonal, so you can humanize it by having biographies and photos of your management team. As an alternative, you can have a group staff photo and then biographies of your top people.

• Company History – Tell customers about your experience and knowledge of the industry. In particular, the number of years your company has been in business, the number of employees, your yearly revenues (so they don’t think you’re going to go bankrupt) and so on. If you have a public annual report or investor portfolio, you may want to link to it as well.

• Partnerships – If you have partnerships with other companies, especially if they’re well known, list them. Some of the trust they have with your partner companies will transfer to your business.

• Larger Corporation Ties – If your company is part of a larger company, explain your relationship. Having the backing of a large company shows customers that you have a stable business.

• Third Party Verification – If your business is a member of any trade organizations or associations, list them. The BBB, for example, is a highly recognizable organization to be part of that will immediately get the attention of site visitors.

• Charity Work and Social Conscience – Customers are often impressed when companies participate in and encourage charity work by their employees. If you’re active in your community, explain your involvement and its importance to you.

• Quality Assurance – Customers want to know that you care about your products and service. Describe what measures you take to ensure the best quality products. Show customers that you take the time to get things rights.

Posting this information may make the difference in whether a customer trusts your site enough to buy or not. Ideally, link to your “About Us” page from your homepage. It should be one of your last links, at the bottom of all your pages or somehow separated from your product categories. These are typical places visitors will look for the link.

Small Booth Guerrilla Tactics for Trade Shows – Marketing

Imagine you are a business in a 10’ x 10’ booth space. You are not one of the big companies with a fancy rotating sign anchored to the ceiling or have a space the size of a basketball court. How do you compete? Here are some simple guerrilla tactics we’ve used at tradeshows.

• A Different Kind of Handout – Your handout is one way to make an impact with your attendees. We stay away from 8.5” x 11” handouts because they’re typical. One year we did a tall and narrow handout so it would stick up a couple of inches above the 11” handouts in an attendees’ bag.

• Contests – Contests where visitors have to fill in a card are one way we give ourselves enough time to actually talk to an attendee. If you have a line up, it creates traffic and interest around your booth. As well, the people waiting in line have time to look at your displays. We don’t accept business cards for draws because it’s too fast for the person to leave. If they ask why, we tell them that to keep it fair, all ballots have to be the same size and not everyone has business cards.

• Popular Swag – These are freebies you give to booth visitors. You may want to research popular items previous years at the tradeshow you’re attending. For example, eBay Live! is famous for its pins so all booths that gave out a stylish pin were popular hot spots. A unique freebie is another way to draw in people. You may want to make a profile of the type of people who’ll be attracted to the tradeshow and come up with an idea from there.

• Tradeshow Only Discounts – People like to feel special. We usually have a tradeshow only package or discount, but you have to buy during the tradeshow. It’s easy for someone to forget about your deal if they don’t sign up for it during the show.

• Beat Your Competitors’ Product – Find out which of your competitors will be at the tradeshow before going. Research what they sell and be prepared with a list of reasons you’re comparatively better than them.

If you’ve seen something that grabbed your attention at a tradeshow, I invite you to mention it in the comments.

Read More:

Small Booth Guerrilla Tactics for Tradeshows – Booth Location

-Emily Hirai