I recently had the opportunity to speak at The Cool Twitter Conference - a traveling show dedicated to all things Twitter.  The San Diego venue, Croce’s was filled with folks watching and tweeting - the new manner in which we engage in conferences, I’ve noticed. You can view my presentation on Slideshare by clicking above.

What do you think? Anything I missed? Tweet me @mcmilker.

Now, like popular memes on blogs, a number of Twitter memes have gone weekly. The most well known is #Followfriday. To use it Twitterers simply list some of their favorite folks to follow and add the hastags #followfriday.

My first thought after reading this article was, “Wow, wouldn’t it be great if we had a #followfriday like tag for the green community?”

Over the weekend though, while I was playing around with ideas like #sustainable saturday and #greentuesday my blogger buddy and green web strategist, Rob Reed of @maxgladwell fame came up with #EcoMonday, which appeared early Monday morning and spurred hundreds of Twitter fans to recommend their favorite green Twitter streams.

To keep the momentum going, Rob has also set up an @ecomonday account on Twitter, where you can look for the most recommended green Tweople to follow. @Ecomonday will only follow those that follow @Ecomonday and those who are recommended in the meme.

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How do you find time to tweet?

How do you find new followers?

How often do you tweet per day?

Queries come from friends and clients and others in the green community. What I tell them all is a strategy is important. When I take on a new client, the first questions I ask are what is your objective? How do you want to use your Twitter account? What do you hope to accomplish?

As a marketing guru, I ask these types of questions all of the time. Sometimes I’m met with blank stares.

I do however believe that in order to be successful, you have to know what you hope to accomplish. This seems a bit obvious to anyone involved in a business, but in the social media world, which started as a way to make personal contact sometimes the topic just doesn’t come up.

If you are a business that hopes to use social media to reach your target consumers or raise your profile or promote your product then you want to ask these questions. You want to know how to accomplish your goals. But you also want to follow social media netiquette, which requires that you inject some of personality into your Tweets.

Once you’ve defined your strategy, you can begin to build your following. Here are 4 ways to get your started.

1. Try to tweet a few different times per day. Because your followers are on the web at different times and in different time zones, spreading out your tweets ensures you are seen by a wide variety of your followers.

2. Use Twittersearch. By entering key words into Twitter search, like “green marketing” or “green business” you can follow the conversation, retweet interesting comments and find new people to follow. ( Also check out my post on Top 10 in Green You Should Follow on Twitter.)

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My expectations attending this, the first annual awards show were low, but I was surprised how professional and well attended the awards turned out to be. Though, my account @greenmoms was the winner in the #green category, we weren’t the only green company at the awards. @pawluxury, an entrepreneurial, organic dog food and accessories company won in the #business category. I wrote about how they successfully use social media at A Green Social Media Story – Paw Luxury.

I first started using Twitter, as @mcmilker, in 2007, slowly at first and then, as I discovered the power of this short messaging service, with more frequency. I’ve added feeds from blogs for which I write and wrote about the Top 10 in Green You Should follow on Twitter. This list, of course tends to be a bit fluid, so I suppose I’ll be writing about it again.

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The idea for this story actually came to me from our writer, Jennifer Kaplan, but since I’ve written on this topic before, she asked if I might want to tackle it – Sure.  A few months back, Darren Rowse challenged his readers to create a top ten to follow list to Twitip. As you can see, 192 of us responded with out top ten list folks who Twitter on a wide variety of topics. My list was green.

But, I’ve had a chance to think about it some more.

Trying to determine how to best build your list of followers can be a challenge and a raging argument is going on right now with the Twitterati on quality versus quantity. Is it better to follow lots of people and have lots of followers or does the quality of the follower matter?

As a marketing guru, I lean toward quality. I tweet almost everyday and I’ve set up Twitter accounts for several clients and have carefully managed which people we follow; at what rate we gain followers and how closely they match the target market we are attempting to reach.

Why?

The reason quality matters is your ability to reach out to your target audience is limited by how many of their tweets you see. If you follow random people, those tweets to which you might want to respond get lost in the masses of tweets you receive. (In some ways the 2000 followers limit on Twitter is a good thing.)

So, if you’re looking for green folks to follow on Twitter, take a minute and consider, what sort of green people should I be following?

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I’m actually rather excited today though, since one of the accounts I set up and manage on Twitter, @greenmoms just won the 2008 Shorty awards for green. I’m looking forward to going to New York City to accept the award along with the Greenmoms founder, Lynn, from organicmania.

There, are, of course, more and more green social media success stories and today I’d like to talk about one – Paw luxury – their tagline – eco-living for the everyday dog.

Adam and Wendy, live in Williamsport, PA successfully ran YourAuctionCompany, where they sold on eBay for people locally for over 5 years. Adam describes how they got started with Pawluxury and their vision as follows::

… we meet some wonderful people along our journey. So, then we decided that we needed a change and one day we looked at our little boxer girl Lola (our child) and had a light bulb moment. We answered the age old question “What are we passionate about?” We realized we were passionate about the earth, our dog and making a difference in the world.

Evolving from the overwhelming love of our beautiful, loyal, carefree, lovable and cuddly boxer named Lola, Paw Luxury was born. As proud parents we wanted to give Lola the best nature had to offer but found it difficult to find eco-friendly products under one roof. So we went sniffing with Lola, searched high and low and dug a few holes along the way. Then we thought to ourselves why not create a one-stop online destination that caters to the need for healthy alternatives.

As well established users of online media, they entered the social media space and have built up quite a following using a variety of social media tools, starting with Youtube. Adam says:

We use Youtube to create video & viral content that dog owners and animal lovers will enjoy. By creating a profile and including a link to our blog or website in it, the exposure gained on Youtube we create brand awareness and increase traffic to our blog, our online store, other social media outlets, or any other content that we created. We often do video product giveaways, video of Lola, post product reviews of items sold on pawlux.com, how to video, tips etc. We have in the works a podcast we will also be placed on youtube. Youtube is a great way for people to get to know us and our adorable Lola personally and people can put  a face with the company. We want to always be transparent with the social media communities we are proud & lucky to be a part of.

Youtube is only part of their strategy though. Their twitter profile, @pawluxury has over 11,000 followers. They use their Facebook page to enable fans to get updates on PawLuxury happenings, blog post, view pics of Lola, watch other viral funny viral pet related youtube videos & more.

Adam sent me a list of the various social media and social bookmarking sites they have and I spent some time looking through them. Like most of us in social media, they diligently update some and let others fall by the wayside. They keep their Flickr photostream and Linkedin profile updated and have let some of their social bookmarking profiles fall by the wayside. They are also very active Twitter users.

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You can hear more from Sean Daily at GreenLivingIdeas.com and also hear my interview with him here.

Everyone is wondering what to do about social media. How does it fit into a marketing plan? How does it fit into a business plan? Should we engage? How much? What is this thing called social media?

An article Where Does Social Media Sit in a Firm? Probably Many Places in Marketing &Strategy Innovation Blog, one of my favorites, details several places. Quoting Jim Tobin, a few obvious and not so obvious applications are identified.

Brand managers can now use social media as an integral part of marketing campaigns.

Product developers can use social media for consumer intelligence. The idea that you have to spend tens of thousands to get limited information from focus groups is becoming outmoded.

Public relations can look at the messages that they send and figure out how they can make them a) more interesting and b) more easily digested by the blogosphere and the networks.

Customer service should be using social media to decrease call volume and increase customer satisfaction. Paying $35 per phone call to answer the same types of questions thousands of times isn’t helping anyone.

Human resources can be using social media to convey what working at the company is all about, and they should certainly be using it to go find candidates with particular backgrounds.

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