Nate Riggs: Social Business Strategies; communication, social web strategies, & passion in Columbus, Ohio.

I’m thinking about writing a short eBook that I’ll host on my blog and provide to you free of charge.

For months now, Twitter-related links have been the main traffic referral source to my blog.  You’ll notice that I don’t have a lot of subscribers, compared to other bloggers that I benchmark myself against.  It’s frustrating.  But in traveling recently, I’ve met people from all over who tell me that they’ve been reading my blog for some time. To be honest, those comments were appreciated, but also surprising.  My subscriber count is really low.

Then, Mike Brown said something that got my gears turning.  When I asked him: “Do you subscribe to my blog?”  He answered:  “No.  But I do read your posts from Twitter every day.”My average daily returning traffic is somewhere around 3,500 visitors.  My current subscriber count on Feedburner at the time of this post is 142.  I have over 17,000 followers on Twitter and that continues to grow.

Distributing and Consuming Media

I put a lot of work into using Twitter to share content and feed the system.  There seems to be this idea of 12:1 in terms of presence building, meaning that to be successful in building your online brand, you need to promote the work and ideas of others 12 times more than you promote your own stuff.  Realistically, I average tweeting about 15 to 25 social objects that I don’t own each day.

I think that this is, in part, the result of my own media consumption patterns.  I primarily use email subscriptions and Google Reader to stay up on what’s happening and the bloggers that influence me.  Reading posts from tweets and links is rare for me, except when someone directly copies me on a tweet with a call to click.

This makes me wonder: am I weird?  Are most people doing things differently today?  I want to find out how you get your media.  Will you take this poll I’ve started in LinkedIn?  Pretty please?

What Presence Building on Twitter Really Means

I believe presence building is mainly about creating yet another lever.  By showing up to and participating in the online cocktail party, we build more than just a following. We open opportunities for real relationships.

Recently, my friend Desarae was in town from Minneapolis.  We met on Twitter.  While she was in Columbus, I introduced her to many of my close friends using Twitter.  It was easy.

What’s funny is that another friend, Mike Cordes, introduced us.  He did that using Twitter as the medium.  You might notice his Twitter picture and the blue TweetMyTime jersey.  I met Mike on Twitter when he asked if he could join team TweetMyTime at the Columbus Marathon.  To this day, all three of us primarily communicate using Twitter because it’s fast, easy and loads of fun.

Do you get where I’m going with this?

McLuhan was right.  The medium really is the message.  In social penetration, frequency of communication is important.  A medium like Twitter allows for unobtrusive frequency to be easy, while also taking advantage of Chris’s idea on Anywhen.

It would seem then that using Twitter as a primary communication tool to find and build relationships is a statement of human brand value.  For instance, one might get the message:

• “I’m here because I’m open to meeting new people”
• “I enjoy talking with other humans and I want to do it often, even when I’m doing other things.”
• “I know that you are too busy for random 10 minute phone calls and respect that.  I can talk with you in 14o characters or less when you have time to respond.”

Twitter is also a numbers game.  The larger you build your presence (presence being thought of as a phone book, in this sense), the more you can leverage the nature of serendipity.  Not every follower will end up as a true relationship, but if conversion of those relationships is a small percentage, then a larger presence will also equal a larger percentage.

From a small business lens, I believe presence building is absolutely essential.  Why?  As a small business owner, you have limited dollars and even more constraints on your time.  In that sense, building strong relationships through more frequent communication provides a competitive advantage in terms of finding opportunities (leveraging serendipity) and retaining customers (building stronger, lasting relationships).

Humans Marketing Channels and Theater of the Mind

Essentially, marketing creates leverage.  In the traditional sense, marketing messages help to position the product or service in the mind of the end consumer so that when the consumer finally hits the point of purchase – whether it’s a checkout counter, shopping cart or B2B account executive – they already want to buy what you sell.

But now things are much different.  Communication tools have changed in such a way that we humans have an entire arsenal that allows individuals the ability to create the leverage that you once needed a department of people to accomplish.

Human marketers are artists at creating theater of the mind.  This is the idea of using technology to create the illusion of being everywhere at once, and all the time.  This type of visibility driven largely by using Twitter has helped to create a new breed of celebrities and heros, fueled by both intellect and inherent charisma.

Visibility is also the sister of accessibility, which is very different from the celebrities of older media such as television and radio.  Celebrities in those mediums are primarily exclusive and work hard to stay away from the commoners by using money and status as the barrier.

Yet, humans are delighted when someone they admire is accessible to them.  Twitter, as a communication tool, provides that type of accessibility but also the convenience to make communication manageable.  For instance,  think about how many tweets your favorite blogger or author must get each day. I’m willing to bet that if you tweet them right now, they will probably respond, even if it’s only a few words and an emoticon.  When these popular (and busy) folks do respond, how does that make you feel?

As mobile devices improve over time, so will our ability to master this type of communication illusion.

What This eBook Will Be About

I want to write this to teach you how to build presence and create your own illusions, starting first with Twitter.  Here’s the basic overview of my ideas for chapters:

• How I Listen and a Few Other Ways to Approach Listening to the Web
• Selecting Your Presence Building Tools and Knowing Why
• The Importance of Frequency and Timing
• Copy Writing in 140 Characters for Successful Presence Building
• One-to-One Conversations in the Public Twitter-Sphere
• Leveraging The Social Graph of Others for Friendly Mutual Gains
• Feeding the System with Value without Being Boring
• Conversational Social Marketing and Response (Guest-Written Chapter)
• Hub & Spoke:  How To Tips for Business Blog Content Distribution on Twitter and the Effects

But before I put a ton of effort into a project like this, I want to ask you:

Will this be of value to you?  Will you read it?  And most importantly, what would you add?

Please let me know in the comments…

nateriggs

I advise mid-sized & large organizations on how to adopt and use social media to market through organizational culture and better serve their clients. I'm also a blended family dad who enjoys music, photography and distance racing. When I'm not writing here, you can find me writing over at the Content Marketing Institute. Like what you've read so far? Then why not subscribe HERE?

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts