I’ve been Tweeting (@loisgeller) for 2 years and I enjoy it. A lot.

But I never gave Twitter a lot of thought until the other day when my friend, Amy Africa (@amyafrica in Twitter talk), called to chat.

We talk about a lot of things but sooner or later the “How’s business?” question comes up. “Fine,” I told her, “but it could always get better.”

Amy’s an Internet marketing expert and she knows that I have 12,000 or so Twitter followers. She mentioned that having a large-ish Twitter following credentializes you. Amy tends to just mention things and let you make the connection.

I made this connection immediately. Could the time I spend on Twitter ever actually do my business any good? Twitter is big part of what we call Social Media – Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn, this blog, etc., all of which I’m involved in to different degrees. Could Social Media do my agency any good?

I should know the answer but I’m not sure I do.

I write about the power of Social Media: relationships, consistency of voice, brand issues, one-to-one communication, frequency, etc. I know how to make a deal, how to close a sale.

Does all this credentializing do any good? Have I been invited to make more speeches this year than last year? Does anyone send me a Tweet asking for marketing help? No and no.

So I asked my Twitter friends if I’m missing anything. Here’s what a few of them said:
@vbpickett: “You should appreciate the great friendships” ( I do!)

@Journeywoman said “absolutely invest in Twitter time …”

@MatthewTNelson:“I have my tweetdeck open all day and I’m constantly scanning for website RFPs. When I see one interesting I reach out and connect.”

Later he tweeted that he had landed two website development contracts via Twitter in the past year.
Wow! Results. Now I have to figure out how to home in and do the same.

If you have any ideas, suggestions, advice you can share, I’d love to hear from you.

It amazes me that when I’m in a large group, I almost always hear the same three comments about Twitter:

· Twitter is for kids, mostly following celebrities.

· Who cares what some people are eating for dinner?

· I tried it for a few days, and thought it was like talking to myself.

So many people try Twitter and never go back. That’s like trying to be a doctor and dropping out after BP 101.

When I was growing up my Mom and Dad would never allow quitting. When I signed up (and paid up) for baton twirling lessons, I had to stick with them even after my twirling with fire almost burned out the gym, sort of like Carrie.

Twitter Quitters had short attention spans. All Social Media practitioners are always testing new platforms, engaging with new people and using it everyday.

In fact, I’m just trying Gowalla today, Foursquare, too.

I don’t want to have Twitter as my one area of expertise. Using all the Social Media and connecting them will multi-purpose my content and increase my luck!

I once sent out a tweet that asked how many of my followers read the newspaper every day. A few told me they read it online, and one lady tweeted she reads her Pennysaver every week.

That is a scary thought for me, because I get nervous when people don’t read. Most of all, I feel sick to my stomach when I think people aren’t curious about things going on in the world, or new ideas, or innovations. Just plain curious is good.

Twitter is great that way. If there is breaking news, someone is always tweeting about it, and I hear it first on my Tweetdeck. I can also test all kinds of things on Twitter:

1. Ask people about something, with a link to show it (people read tweets with links).

2. Ask for advice. Recently I was throwing my new iMac into the ocean as I couldn’t get it to work because the monitor showed vertical colored lines. As soon as I tweeted about it, 5 or 6 people told me the computer was dead period. Take it back to the store.

3. I make friends on Twitter with people who share my point of view. Many people who I’ve had conversations with on Twitter have come to visit us, or called me, and when I visit a city…I get many invitations for coffee and lunch to meet in person.

4. For business, because of the huge numbers of people on Twitter, I can do a tweet and invite people to come to our Facebook page and enter a contest. They do come and then I can send them to a website to sign up for a newsletter (and get their email addresses).

5. If I want to find people who are lawyers on Twitter, I can go to twitter.search.com or simply press #lawyers and find all lawyer mentioned in the last 10 minutes or an hour.

The opportunities are endless to use Twitter as the driver to take people to your website, or blog, or E-zine. It’s got great possibilities…and I’m sure you’ll think of new ones for your business!

I missed it when I was in Vancouver a few weeks ago, because my iPhone service was “iffy” and my tweetdeck was very slow. Why…I ask myself into the night?

Well, if you ask my “real life” friend @amyafrica she’d say that all my followers are wackos anyway, so why even read their tweets.

If you ask my friend @anierenberg, she’ll say the only way to network is in person, not on social media. I do notice lately though when we talk on Sunday nights that there is a tweet tweet sound in the background…so she may be adapting.

I like Twitter for several reasons:
1. I can follow people that I might never have access to in life (or it would be hard to meet them). For example, recently I contacted @marcishimoff who wrote the book, Happy For No Reason. I thought she might write an article for one of our client’s on-line newsletters. So, I tweeted on over to Marci and asked, and she said we could talk about it. Bingo!

2. Learning from the Twitter leaders is interesting, and recently I was sent from Twitter to @chrisbrogan ‘s blog, where he talked about a great book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. He said that it was about how the author talks about the stories of our lives and how when he got off the couch and started moving that his whole story changes.
I bought the book right away on amazon.com .

3. When I need help, I start tweeting about my problem on Twitter and someone always comes to the rescue in minutes. So, when my new television set couldn’t be set up with the Best Buy guys on Comcast…I marched over to my tweetdeck and in about 30 seconds, I heard from Frank Eliason of @comcastcares and they talked the installers through the process.
Last week I struggles with my new iMac, and people from Best Buy jumped in and told me right away to return it to the store (as there is no cure for vertical color lines on your monitor).

4. And, then I make friends on Twitter I’d never meet in life. @joebees was talking about taking a run and mentioned the loop in Aventura….right outside my apartment. I started talking to him, and he came to visit my office laden with great bee pollen vitamins for us all.

@tlmaurer and I are always exchanging funny chat during the day. She was sad about my computer and eventually told me I should write a rap song about my problems with Apple and put it on YouTube. We’ve been back and forth writing rhyming lyrics ever since.

@relevance , my friend Ted always gives me advice on my latest challenge and @Ernieschell told me about visiting the Barnes Foundation Museum a few weeks back before it moved the collection. I did and it was great.

So, I guess I enjoy Twitter, because it helps me in my life, and my work and introduces me to all kinds of great people….and it improves my luck. So many people have asked me to speak at their meetings, because I’m always giving my latest marketing tips on Twitter.

So, just try it for two months. It is not about who is eating a ham sandwich any more.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you about some Twitter Marketing Strategies we’re testing for clients. Stay tuned.

(The year is so much easier to type than it was 12 years ago in good old MDCCCCLXXXXVIII – or is it IIMM?) I’m using Roman numerals her to subtly hint that there’s an old school idea in today’s blog.
The end of the year is always a great time to look back to the good old days, say back to MMVIII, aka 2008.

Remember planning? A lot of our clients (and even some not-yet clients) ask us for new creative ideas for their next year’s Grand Plan.

It’s nice that they think we’re so creative we can come up with brilliant ideas on the spot – sometimes we do – but often they turn a deaf ear to our best idea: look back. “You’ve had major successes in the past and what worked then will work now.”

We have to prod them a bit sometimes but eventually they remember programs that were gangbusters in, say, MDCCCCLXXXXVI, but they dropped them because the programs were “tired”. I doubt that prospects got tired of them but I know our clients did.

So maybe in 2010 you might:

• Revive a few older creative approaches that worked well. Maybe update the graphics, try a new offer. I’ve seen this work wonderfully well many times. It’s inexpensive, quick and, more often than not, very profitable.

• Make one program fantastic. One of our clients asked us to work on website, email program and newsletter all at once. We’re still hanging on to all of them waiting for photographs of staff, final product mix and a decision on a name for the their new social community. Had they asked us to focus on, say, the website, we’d have it done by now and could flow in all the missing details in a few hours. That’s what we did for our friends at the National Cleaners Association. Take a look here: NCA Website

• Take one area that your really enjoy in social media land, and focus on it. I’ve been very involved in Twitter for the last year: Check me out here: LoisGeller”s Twitter
I even have a Twitter Philosophy on following people: (twitterwatchdog) At first I tried to be on LinkedIn, Facebook, Plaxo, Ecademy, Hi5 and Twitter every day. Then Attention Deficit Disorder set in. I couldn’t learn about any of the communities until I actually spent time on them. Pick one, and focus.

• In 2010, consider going to quieter places. Everyone is running to Google. It’s competitive there, and very complicated these days. Maybe you might want to focus your efforts on another search engine where you can end up higher on the list. I know people who use Ask.com all the time.

• Consider unique, even weird, offers and use your own brand personality to articulate them in a human way. If everyone else is giving 10% off on first purchase, try a gift with purchase instead. Maybe that gift can become your trademark, like the lucky trolls I use here at the Lois Geller Marketing Group. For some reason, people love them.

• And consider under-promising and over-delivering on any of the services or products you offer. Nationally, 1-800-CONTACTS does that and I just can’t imagine ordering lenses anywhere else. Locally, Coit Cleaners does it nicely, too – surprise and delight! I always remember buying a Ford Explorer years ago. Two weeks later, they sent beautiful director’s chairs in a canvas bag.

Bought another Ford just a few months ago.

Happy 2010. Make it great.

My Creative Director and friend Michael McCormick (Guts of a Burglar blogster) needs a new car (at least I think so). His Ford Explorer is 12 years old, runs like a top and still looks pretty good … on the outside.

The inside is a different matter entirely. Passengers have to fly their legs over the Sirius antenna wire; the spots and stains are, well, spots and stains. The A/C in the back doesn’t work anymore and the vehicle is almost ready for its confirmation or bar mitzvah.

When Michael got this Explorer back in the late ‘90s (it’s his second one), I went with him to the dealership in Queens. He told the saleslady what he wanted, and she asked him what color he liked.

Anything you have is fine, he said. She and I looked at each other in disbelief.

Anyway, I thought the Cash for Clunkers program was a heaven sent opportunity for Michael to get a new ride. He disagreed. He thinks his Chuck (the Truck) is barely broken in. The tires are new, the brakes are new, the oil’s been changed and fluids checked every 3,000 miles. Yada yada.

It took me a while to understand his real reason.

For weeks I encouraged him to go to see the new cars. He wants an Explorer but the closest Ford dealership closed and they don’t make Explorers anymore, anyway.

So, I went to tweetdeck and started asking around. @ScottMonty, Ford’s Twitter spokesperson, gave me some recommendations. Another friend suggested the Flex and sent me photos. No buying action. I asked Michael why he wasn’t moving on this.

Turns out he really and truly doesn’t think taxpayers should be subsidizing his new car. Hmm. Hadn’t thought of that. And, he pointed out, a new vehicle cost a lot more than $4,500, perhaps around $25,000 more for what he wants. Why spend all that dough when he doesn’t need a new car? Men are soooo logical. It’s frustrating. But I already knew that. The new insights this whole episode provided got me thinking.

Not too long ago, the only way Ford could show its cars was in print or television advertising. Now that’s all changed.

What we see on TV or in ads is one-way communication, the company talking at us and controlling the flow of information.

Now we control the flow of information and we can find what we want, when we want it and consult with friends and family and experts along the way. I’ve known all this in theory and in making smaller purchasers for quite a while, but it’s a different matter to experience the whole process for a big ticket item (like a new SUV) in the real world of actually buying it.

In the meantime, people haven’t stopped looking for authenticity. And marketers are paying serious attention to what’s going on in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. On the web, customers can find anything, competitive prices, colors, and visit a website and buy anything in a NY minute.

Except, of course, Michael. He’ll be driving that car and me – and, horrors, clients – into the ground. Eventually, he’ll chat with a few friends and head off and buy a Flex or Edge or, who knows, a Club Cab F-250 – purple with a yellow interior, that some dealer happens to have on the lot and ready to roll.

Twitter’s site went down for a few hours the other day and within 15 minutes I started feeling the pangs of withdrawal. Why? My goodness, it’s just a web site for short messages, isn’t it?

As I thought about it last night – why am I so attracted to Twitter? – it occurred to me that the reason might lie in Twitter’s competitive value to small companies like mine. In an important way, it gives us a leg up on big companies.

A lot of corporations worry about Twitter. Many of them don’t want to tweet on their own because they can’t control the process tightly; maybe employees will give people a bad impression of their brand. So they turn to their large agencies for help in testing social media. The large agency gives the job to junior creative people who do the best they can. The problem is that they can’t come up with revenue projections for Twitter results.

But small companies can really go to town with Twitter marketing. They can be themselves. If they’re looking for local customers, they can find them on Search. So if, for example, I have a store that specializes in interesting kites, I can talk about all the people who fly kites, I can give ideas for parties, have kite flying contests and sell discount kites, Twitter invite only, say once a month.

After several months, I can track ROI on Twitter much more easily than a large company ever could. This means that small businesses can:

• Build a great big wonderful Brand and voice that sound like they come from a real person;

• Begin to develop really solid friendships.

I’ve been doing this for a while now and I’m seeing real value. And I actually do feel a lot like the man behind the curtain, the Wizard of Twitter, pulling all the right levers.

If you’re interested in a Twitter or Social Media Program, feel free to call: 646-723-3231 or to visit me, on Twitter, of course, at twitter.com/loisgeller