SES New York 2009

I’m in New York all week at the Search Engine Strategies conference.

Guy Kawasaki kicked things off on Tuesday with a great keynote on how he uses Twitter.  Here’s a quick summary of Guy’s rules for Twitter:

1. Forget the A-List

In other words, don’t worry about trying to make friends with the top 10 Twitter celebrities.  You’ll do just fine following people with interests similar to your’s.

2. Get Lots of Followers

Guy’s advice is to not be choosy - follow anyone who follows you.  In Guy’s case, the number of people he follows is larger than the number of followers.

3. Monitor Twitter

Start with search.twitter.com and regularly search on your name, your company’s name and your segment to monitor Twitter activity that is related to you.

4. Copy Best Practices

Study what other companies do to discover best practices.  Start with Comcast, JetBlue and Amazon Deals.

5. Search

Use the advanced search tools that Twitter provides.  Guy’s example is of a brake shop that searches for the term “brake job” within 15 miles of their zip code.  The brake shop will reach out to the Twitter user to tell them about their brake repair service and converts the Twitter user into a customer 10% of the time.

6. Tools

Lots of great tools are available for Twitter users.  Guy covered several including Tweetdeck, Twhirl and cotweet.

7. Squeeze the Trigger*

Guy views Twitter as a marketing tool and uses it that way.  A platform that Guy demonstrated is Twitterhawk which provides an automated search and retweet capability.

8. Share Generously to Get Retweeted

Find and tweet useful stuff and your followers will retweet you. The idea is that each of your followers has their own followers.  So even if you have only a few hundred followers, retweeting expands your total reach into the thousands.

9. Take the Heat*

If followers don’t agree with your approach to Twitter, Guy’s advice is to send them a three letter message: UFM which means “unfollow me”

*I asterisked 7 and 9 because some people view Guy’s approach to Twitter as being at the aggressive end of the marketing-use scale.  7 & 9 go together, the more you pull the trigger, the more heat you are likely to get.

For more on Guy’s controversial presentation, see the Wall Street Journal’s Guy Kawaski Can Handle Being Called a Spammer.