In which Charlie reveals why people might be dropping you from their Twitter lists like you’re a poisonous puffer fish coated in hot lava and rabid Saint Bernard slobber.

I‘m sure there are an infinite number of reasons why people might choose to drop you from their Twitter lists. I’m sure someone, sometime, with no thought about it, will drop you simply because they had a funky bagel for breakfast. That said, it’s fairly likely that two main overriding rules are the essence of any unfollow. If you’re the impatient type, stick with these bolded statements and call it a day. Then go make me some cookies¹:

Remember why people are listening to you and then give them something they want to hear.

Each little tweet takes up a tiny bit of time and is, in essence, a brief interruption. Use that time wisely.

Those are fairly broad and general ideas, so I’m gonna break them down into a few specifics that will make you go, “Hmm,” “Ahhh,” and stroke your chin wisely.

A commonsense guide to using Twitter

The basics are already covered

Every single person on this planet eats, drinks, sleeps and uses the bathroom. Unless it’s really news, it probably isn’t really news.

If you just ate a real live pterodactyl or passed a fire hydrant through your digestive tract, by all means report it to the masses. If not, consider the newsworthiness of such circadian items before letting us all know.

Nothing disastrous about sharing personal things, but minimize it where you can. Give us the goods!

Who does it right? @sushiday. Awesome Twitter user and blogger. She transforms food into something I really care about, regardless of the medium. And that’s saying a lot for a guy who rarely remembers he needs to eat at all.

Don’t JUST be a reTweeter

If people are following you, it’s because they want to hear what you think. I’m all for supporting my friends and reTweeting when something awesome comes down the interwebs, and I’m not saying it should always be about you. Part of the magic about Twitter is how reTweets can turn something awesome into something awesomely viral in a nano-second.

But it sort of needs to be awesome first. “Bread belongs on sandwiches,” isn’t really worth the reTweet.

So reTweet the awesome stuff or come up with original Tweets of your own.

Give us stuff we can’t get elsewhere

I’ve been seeing a lot of inspirational quotes floating though the Twitterverse. Mark Twain and Martin Luther King and Helen Keller are all alive and well on Twitter. Not a bad thing; some of their quotes are real doozies and they were magical people.

But remember that there are books and websites for this type of thing. Also remember that dead people, by definition, are no longer coming up with unique and inspirational quotes. “Carpe Diem” is old news for most of us now. And also remember that we’re not following MLK or Twain…we’re following you.

Go ahead and quote something old and well known, but don’t forget to be unique as often as you can. Give us a quote of your own, eh?

Who does it right? @jillkoenig. Jill does a splendid job of mixing inspiring old quotes with her own business acumen, personal tips, punchy adages. She’s the epitome of pithy.

Leave the TV out of it

Do you know how much I care about television? While it’s on…just barely slightly above zero. When it’s off…zero. When I’m on Twitter…even less than that. Nobody cares what you’re watching on TV and I’m guessing they don’t care who your favorite American Idol contestant is.

I guess you could make the argument that you’re letting your personality shine through by showing followers what you do and who you are when you’ve got free time. But I’d counter that if your personality is based on television shows…mmm…you got some thinking to do. And then you could further argue, but it would come out like, “Brhuyc, juadhbl, aiyha,” because there’s really no way to argue with me.

Remember why people are following you to begin with

While blog newbies still do it and always will, probloggers have for the most part caught on that going way off topic isn’t a good thing to do with their blogs. Unfortunately, Twitter goes that route a bit, probably because it’s still in its infancy and it is devilishly easy to post to Twitter.

However, just because it’s easy to post doesn’t mean you should. Grow your brand when you can. If you don’t have anything earth-shattering to report, it’s totally fine to not say anything at all. And when you do get around to Tweeting, make it on-topic to yourself. Report on cars if you run a car blog. Report on graphic design if you run a graphic design blog. Report on new products if you’ve got ‘em. Remember why people are listening to you, and then give them something they want to hear.

Who does this right? @John_Dickinson. John runs Motionworks, a great blog about motion graphics. On Twitter, John is completely and totally invisible unless he’s reporting something having to do with, you guessed it, motion graphics. I don’t know of anyone who keeps as on-topic as John does. And now that I think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen John tweet something to the general community that was only meant for one person. Which brings me to the next point…

Twitter ain’t no chatroom

Subjecting all nine-thousand of your followers to a conversation you’re having with ONE friend is a lousy way to go about things. Unless the conversation is really insanely awesome and meaningful. It’s sort of like being on a subway in New York, while some guy is on his cell phone talking to his friend about his latest conquest or his grocery list or something. It’s invasive, in that really boring, “why must we all be subject to this,” sort of way that makes you equally want to be in a coma and hit someone with a large brick.

Also, realize that while YOU may be having a chat with @Joe, a lot of your followers might not be connected to @Joe at all. This means your followers are only seeing your side of the conversation, and that leads to an awesome string of Tweet lameness that looks like this:

You: “Doing good, you?”
You: “Dinner, then a movie.”
You: “Usually just olive oil, maybe a little salt.”
You: “Yeah, I remember that.”

Great. Awesome. Thanks for that really awkward half-conversation.

Remember, Twitter has a direct messaging feature which allows us to talk to @Joe without confusing everyone else. Use it unless what you’re saying is meant for everyone.

Tie in your job to your personality:

If you’re a graphic designer (and therefore have followers interested in the life and times of a graphic designer) Tweeting “my son just crapped his pants,” isn’t the best use of the medium. “My son just crapped on my Wacom tablet,” is more fitting and will strike chord with fellow designers, even those who don’t have kids.

Or better yet, add some real value: “My son just crapped his pants and it inspired me to create some unique Photoshop brushes (link).”

Don’t just be a journalist…be interesting:

Most people have sources for worldly news already, so when passing on current events add some personality to it. Instead of saying, “News on George Bush (link),” say something like, “I always knew that George Bush was a grundle (link),” or something. We can get news anywhere, but there’s only ONE place where I can learn what YOU think about the news.

Respond when people write you:

There’s one particular person I used to follow that I must have written a dozen times. I never once got a single response from him. I said before that Twitter ain’t no chatroom, which it ain’t, but to ignore that many messages without even a peep is super bad manners. One-sided communication starts to make you feel pretty invisible after a while.

How well or poorly you communicate (yes, even on Twitter) is a representation of how you do business. Make sure you’re not scaring people away.

Who does it right? @MenWithPens. James Chartrand of Men with Pens comes on Twitter nearly every day with a “good morning.” And he’s chatty. If you write James, he’ll write you back. He runs a six-figure business but still has time to talk and act like a human on Twitter, various blogs and everywhere else you find him. Hmm…interesting…wonder if there’s a connection there?

Twitter can help your business, make you friends and increase the strength of your empire. So use it, but remember to use it like a human living amongst other humans.

The next post is going to be so insanely incredible, if you don’t read it, it will probably take years off your life. Better subscribe now, eh?

¹: You may be wondering what sort of cookies to bake me. I would say any sort of cookie that goes into my mouth.↑

Question: If you were about to flush $19,000 down the drain, would you know it?

The question up there is a serious one. If there were a division of your company that brought in roughly $19,000 a month, would you keep it going? Shut it down? Would you even know it was pulling in that amount of money?

I would hope so, but on a recent consult I found the same old huge glaring omission that I find with pretty much any individual or business person I talk to. I tell you, I’m about to hire a guy to carve these into stone tablets for me. Or one of those chainsaw artists. He can carve up my couch to read:

1. Some people have no clue how their business is really doing.
2. Some people have no clue how to keep and use stats.
3. Usually these are the same people.

Stats? We don’t need no stinking stats!

I can tell you from first-hand experience exactly what happens pretty much any time you ask an individual or business person for his stats.

“Show me your stats, please,” you say.

“….,” says the guy.

“You know,” you say again, after a long pause, “statistics.”

“Statistics?” says the guy.

“Yeah, stats you know. Up. Down. Sideways. Graph paper sort of thing.”

“Oh, yeah. We don’t really have time for that here,” he says, all puffed up with pride.

“Totally,” you say, “I understand. Must be pretty time consuming walking around with that paper bag over your head.”

The application of stats to real-life

The last person I spoke to about stats is in the food business. She runs a restaurant overlooking a golf course. It’s all very gorgeous and the food is unreal.

Now, once a month she holds huge banquets in her restaurant. They close the restaurant to walk-in customers and convert the dining hall into a banquet room. Extra help is hired on for the occasions, and of course it’s all just a lot of work so she only does it “every once in a while.”

This “once in a while” almost became “never” though. And why? Stats, or lack thereof.

Here, let me back up a bit. The way this lady ran her business consisted of making large amounts of money and keeping it in a pile. She didn’t know which portions of the cash, though, came from catering, these large in-house banquets or regular restaurant income.

She knew she was profitable and wanted to become more profitable. That was the overall plan, and the way she was going to do this was twofold.

One, she was going to quit the banquets entirely. They were large productions, took a lot of time and effort and, “closing the restaurant to walk-in visitors for a whole evening is costing us a lot of money.”

Two, no longer having the banquets, she’d be able to fire her head chef (who was in charge of the banquets and was pulling the largest pay check) and replace him with someone or a couple someones who’d cost less.

She figured that by firing the head chef, and canceling the banquets she’d “make more money by having less expenses.”

This of course is all the province of statistics, and when I asked for hers, she promptly went into a coma.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“I mean I need to see your statistics. Mainly income and outgo. We’ll get to the rest later.”

“I don’t really keep stats,” she says. Thus the door to solving this problem opened, and she got some wicked homework.

“Well, over the next month,” I say, “I want you to track every dime that comes in and every dime that goes out. Don’t fire anyone, don’t hire anyone new, don’t change anything else. Just. Keep. Stats. See you in a month.”

One month later

When we met a month later I was happily surprised to see her stats were immaculate.

Inspecting her income graph for the month, I noticed an obvious spike. A large one. If you haven’t already figured it out from my painfully obvious foreshadowing, the income spike was the result of the monthly banquet. In fact, the banquet was worth about $19,000 in income.

And remember how she thought the banquets were too costly? Well, inspecting her expense graph, there was barely a dent for the night. They’d needed a little more food, a little more alcohol and a few extra hands to help with service.

What she thought was a losing night and a terrible idea was actually her largest income producer. What she discovered is sort of old news in the restaurant business. Large banquets of this sort keep tables full, where otherwise they may be empty. Banquets also consume more appetizers, drink more alcohol and order more desserts.

Plus, as she found out, there’s often a double-gratuity thing that happens. Ordinarily, 15-20% is added on automatically to the bill for a tip. But what often happens is that when signing the bills, people often write in another tip. Probably because they’re hammered out of their skulls, but whatever. It’s income.

Moral of the story

Keep stats. You might be losing money with one area of your business and making money with another. You might be losing money overall. But how will know? Without stats, you probably won’t.

Put it down on paper and be accountable for it. Yes, it takes a few extra minutes a day. But believe me, you can afford it.

Sub-moral of the story that I secretly snuck in. Cutting expenses is great and I highly recommend you trim the fat from your expense sheet. But, as our restauranteur found out, cutting expenses to make more income isn’t very sensible.

Sub-sub-moral that I also snuck in: If you run a restaurant, your product is good food. So don’t fucking fire your head chef. Sheesh.

Promote : to help or encourage to exist or flourish

When you think of promotion do you automatically start thinking about advertising, posters or banner ads? Perhaps you think of sending out 1,000 pieces of direct mail or physically knocking on doors. Or maybe that hairy naked dude who stands on the street corner downtown talking religion.

Those things are promotion in a sense, yes, but that’s also sort of a shallow view of it and lacks an incredibly important element. And this element, let me tell you, can make you sick amounts of money and teach you that promotion can be done anywhere and always. Actually, scratch that “can”. You ARE engaged in promoting always and everywhere.

Promotion is making something known AND well thought of.

People tend to think promotion is just getting the word out, but is not enough. The word has to be acting to your benefit.

Promotion has to further your cause, not just garner attention. Any freak can get in the newspaper, but not every freak is doing real promotion.

Lest this is coming across as cryptic, let me give you a silly example.

If you put out 1,500 direct mail pieces that look horrible, contain misspellings, have the wrong contact info and a picture of people bowing down before Hitler, you HAVEN’T DONE ANY PROMOTION. You’ve missed 50% (probably more, actually) of the promotion formula: the appear respectable part.

Real-world examples of poor promotion

Remember, by our definition, promotion is to make known and respected in people’s eyes.

Here’s how real people and real business are doing it wrong right now:

• The customer service representative who answers the phone by saying, “WHAT?!”
• The IT support lady who, 3 seconds into the call, cracked jokes about my last name (Pabst) and asked me if I get all the free beer I want. Being personal is fine. Being chit-chatty on my dime is not. And shit, if you’re gonna joke with me, you better not pick the most obvious and uncreative path.
• InMotion Hosting, who has been shutting down client websites with hardly an explanation. And when asked to provide solutions, they don’t really have any. When a host offers no solution for their own shortcomings, of course the best solution becomes: switch hosts. Obviously not promotion. You listening, IMH?
• Any website with more ads than content.
• The bus-driver who let’s the bus continue to roll as passengers get off.
• The barista who doesn’t ask what I’d like, but just lifts her eyebrows.
• Anyone ever who doesn’t smile.
• The guy who sold me my car and picked at his fingernails nearly the entire time.
• The gym where I work out that has the fucking heater on right above the free-weights.
• Airplane food.
• My buddy. I love you, dude, but when you have Skype, text messaging, two cell phones and email, there’s no reason why I should have zero confidence in getting in touch with you. Also explains the loss of a five-figure project as well as the impending litigation on another. You. Need. To. Communicate.
• The dude, who SERIOUSLY, right this fucking second, is being patted down by the cops outside the coffee shop…one sec. K, I’m back. Wow. That was entertaining. They’re letting him go now, but they apparently thought he robbed the bank across the street. Thing is, he looks like a bank robber. Shabby and sneaky, hiding under a hat, fat coat and facial hair. Hmm…he’s not promoting the right thing, is he?

Bottom line, you may be getting attention and “doing your job,” but if you’re not furthering your cause, you’re not promoting.

People and companies doing a great job of promotion

• Washington Mutual bank, who dropped $80 of overdraft charges as a result of my own idiocy. Their reason for helping me? I’ve been a great customer for 16 years.
• Bluehost (aff). As a hosting company they kick total ass. Always pick up the phone. Always have a solution to offer for any problems.
• Ron Paul, the badass politician and epitome of integrity who fights tooth and nail so that the US Constitution doesn’t go (more) away, even though his cohorts and the media do their best to ignore him.
• The IT dude who says, “I can help you with that.”
• The pizza parlor that says, “It’ll actually be cheaper if you get another pizza.”
• Macintosh salesmen. They don’t talk about gigs and megs and hertz and backside quad inverters over the flux capacitor with the negative database restructuring. They simply show me what the computer does and does well.
• The barista who says with a smile, “What can I getcha?”
• The girl sitting next to me who smells fantastic.
• The guy I often pass on the sidewalk who looks me in the eye and says, “Hello.”

If someone likes you, wants to approach you, wants to do business with you…you’ve promoted. And as you can see, it sure doesn’t take much effort or invention.

How promotion can you make you sick amounts of money

When I first started my graphic design business I didn’t do any traditional online promoting. None at all. And by traditional I mean banner ads, sidebar ads, AdWords, etc. A lot of folks pour money into these traditional methods and are disappointed in the results.

Well, I just didn’t have the cash for buying online advertising real estate, and, being a new business owner I didn’t want to spend a single dime that I might need if times got lean.

So the sum total of promotional activities that I engaged in was: talking to people.

In my first week of business, I landed a large percentage of the projects I tried to get. While that’s great, it’s not even the interesting part. The amazing thing is that when I asked clients why they’d hired me (you do do this, don’t you?) I got one answer more than any others.

It wasn’t my strong portfolio (I didn’t really have one).

It wasn’t my fancy website (at the time it was fairly average).

It wasn’t my ads (I didn’t have any).

It wasn’t my reputation (I was brand new and unknown).

It wasn’t my testimonials from past clients (I’d never had a client).

The reason I got every single job that week was that I communicated better than the other bidders. I had numerous compliments that first week on my speed of email responses, the fact that I’d respond even if I was out on the town and even that I let my personality shine through in my emails.

I had one client say something extraordinary to me, and this has ever since been in the back of my mind as a rock-solid truth. She said, “I wasn’t looking for the best or the cheapest. I just needed someone to be there and do it. Thank you thank you thank you for always writing me back.”

So here I was afraid I wasn’t doing any promotion, thinking I was going to fail and starve to death. But I was actually doing some of the best promotion I could have done. Promotion, by the way, that was WAY better and said WAY more about me than any advertisement could have. I was simply communicating well and making my services well thought of.

That is promotion. Getting the word out and ensuring it’s making you look good.

While all these little things, like smiling and answering the phone with manners, add up to promotion, the real magic lies in getting the word out in huge numbers and getting massive amounts of people to believe. There is no limit to the creative means of getting the word out and promoting yourself. On that, much more to come later.

In the meantime, what can you do to get your word out? And perhaps more importantly, what can you do to make yourself well thought of?

Need help? Ask me what you can do for your own promotion and marketing?