Social Media Marketing Success with Guy Kawasaki

Social Media Tips from Guy Kawasaki

Great meeting with Guy Kawasaki recently and learning his social media tricks of the trade and tools he uses to engage Fans and Followers in social media. For those of you who don’t know him, Guy Kawasaki is the former chief evangelist at Apple Computer and co-founder at Alltop.  He also writes a blog on American Express Open Forum. He’s easily one of the most engaging and generous speakers I’ve ever heard.

Deep Diving Twitter

There are almost as many Twitter strategies as there are Twitter gurus (or Nazis, as Guy calls them).  Like many of us, Guy uses Twitter to build his personal brand and sell his books.  He uses what he aptly calls the NPR model — give me great stuff and I’ll allow you run pledge week every once in a while.

Too many people forget this.  Even traditional advertising only worked because they gave us great, free programing in exchange for listening to their commercials.  Now, firms want to advertise for free in social media and they expect us to pay attention! They don’t want to give us anything in return! “What a joke. I’m generous, but not stupid”, says Kawasaki.

Guy’s solution is to provide valuable content to get people to WANT to follow you.  Give them great content and they’ll let you put in a plug for your book occasionally.  Examples of great content for social media platforms include:

• Announcements
• Support
• Discounts
• Information
• Customer Service

Some folks get it right, according to Guy.  Folks like VirginAmerica, Ford, DellOutlet, and Kogi BBQ, a small local business — showing that social media can be the big equalizer giving the small guy a chance to compete.  Here’s a great case study of a company that gets social media right.

So, your first objective is to have something to say — something other folks want to hear in social media.  Then, you have to transmit interesting information in a way others will see it.  That’s why he spends a lot of time culling great information (and images) and Tweets it out 3 times a day (because folks are in different time zones).

You only have 140 characters with Twitter, so you mainly Tweet links — links to great content, links back to your websites, and links to your sales pitch.  He uses StumbleUpon as a huge filtration system for interesting stuff to Tweet.  He also uses SmartBrief and The Big Picture (for images), as well as other resources to find great stuff to Tweet.  He also has a team of people who run Holy Kaw, which finds “holy cow” type bits of information.  These are summarized on his website and Tweeted to his followers.

A combination of Tweetdeck, recently acquired by Twitter, Objective Marketer, a powerful Twitter manager, and Hibari help Guy manage his Tweets and provide analytics so he can track ReTweets, Mentions, etc.  Monitoring how engaged followers are with different content helps him provide more valuable content.  This and responding to comments  are key to a successful Twitter strategy.

Deep Diving Facebook

Guy is a relative newcomer to Facebook, but has discovered some tips for making it work for him.  He runs contests, asks questions, and engages Fans by responding to them, just as he does with Twitter or any social media platform.  However, his Facebook strategy is more visual than posting links.  Facebook links might get a few likes and maybe a comment, but posting images he gets many more likes and much more engagement through comments.

Don’t forget your website in your social media strategy.  Guy recounted a test where he posted on Facebook and on his website and got substantially more people viewing on the web than on Facebook.

Engage and Enchant

Guy’s presentation was part of the StartUp America Partnerships — a collaboration of government and private industry to spur entrepreneurship.  Our sponsors were Entrepreneur Magazine and Hiscox Insurance.  Guy also discussed insights from his new book “Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Mind and Actions”.