Nowadays people prefer to connect with other people rather than with a corporate brand. Whether you are a company or individual, branding is a way to make yourself memorable.

Yes, personal branding is about making yourself memorable.

Examples of Personal Brand

Donald Trump is known as a dealmaker. That is his brand. As someone who knows Mr. Trump only from television — in The Apprentice TV series — I also tend to think of “Trump” as quality and luxury.

That’s what I see from my perspective. I believe that is also the message that he put out consistently. Although both his personal brand and product brand are two separate entities, at the first glance they are one.

Although I read that his corporations have filed for bankruptcy recently, it didn’t change my perception about his brand too much. After all, everyone is going through hard times right now. If he is able to make it, perhaps his brand will grow even stronger.

Well, Donald Trump is Donald Trump. How could personal brand be important to an individual offering bookkeeping service?

Personal branding is still important for everyone because it is about perception, i.e. what people are going to associate you with. There are certainly more facets to it, but that explains it quite well, I think.

Chris Brogan is known as a helpful bloggers. His participation in Twitter, for instance, helps shape our thoughts about social media and how to use it for our business. With that association, I automatically spend more time reading his tweets than other people’s, if I only have a short break at lunch.

His brand gives him a competitive advantage over others who offer similar services. It also helps people to talk about him. Overall, his brand makes him worth talking about.

Hey, it works. At least I’m writing about him.

I bet you’ll agree that with those benefits, everyone can find at least a reason to build his/her personal brand.

Personal Branding Tips for Twitter

Now that I got your full attention, let’s get down to the business. Personal brand is certainly a broad topic. It spans multiple media from blog to microblogging, social networks, virtually all across the board.

But let’s just focus on Twitter in this post. If you’ve ever wondered how to get your message noticed and build your name online and especially on Twitter, you may find these tips helpful.

1. Content Shapes Your Brand

Whatever you tweet can help shape your brand on Twitter. If you mostly help others with business ideas, you will soon be known as the business idea guy or lady.

Tweeple who balance between their family in their tweets convey their brand as family people. Humorous individuals will be known as fun and some people will appreciate the sense of humor. Those without a better agenda and tweet promotional messages all of the time are spammers.

Twitter may bring an impact to your brand on the short term, but also remember that once you tweet, the content will be out there for others to search forever.

2. Expand Visibility

As a Twitterer, you are going to be visible if you consciously make yourself visible to the right group of people and influencers.

As much as I like Twitter, it is only one facet of the social media. If you want to build your brand, it will be far more effective if you expand your visibility across multiple platforms.

Creating a web presence is a good start. Build a blog and update it frequently. Use social networking sites to get in touch with others.

3. Listen

Newsgroup, mailing list and forum users should be familiar with the term lurkers. They are people who wander around reading and paying attention to what’s going on without actually participating in conversations.

In search and social media, ego search is common. It is nothing but searching your own name, company name and brand for your product. Recently, social media users start to add Twitter as part of the site to monitor for brand names.

Both ego search and lurking don’t sound bad at all, if your intention is to tune in and listen to what people have to say about you, your company or your product. In fact, people now expect that you hear their rant and whine if they put it out online.

Just to be fair, they also want you to know if they say positive things about your business.

4. Participate

The listening tools like Twitter Search allow you to distinguish between the signal and the noise. Once you got the signals, they are your opportunities to engage in the conversations.

You can also participate proactively by getting involved with Twitter. Send out interesting content discoveries for the day. Ask questions and answer them. Respond to tweets directed to you. There are limitless ways to get involved.

You will see companies use Twitter to hold contests. That is just another way to participate and encourage participation in this new communication medium.

5. Build Community

Whatever your niche is, chances are your market is already out there on Twitter. They are not part of your community though. Through different ways of participation, you can build your personal brand faster. One way to do this is by going out and become a leader.

Creating community that people want to be part of is a quick way to deliver your message. If your have successfully engaged influencers as part of your community, very likely your message will go viral, assuming that they are worth talking about.

6. Foster Relationships

Twitter as a broadcast tool is awesome for reaching thousands of people in one swoop. But still, the real value of Twitter for business, is to reach people and network with them.

You may know a few individuals who are otherwise shielded from the outside world but suddenly you know they are on the plane to someplace because of their tweets. You also know what projects they are currently on.

Twitter also makes people more reachable.

Sure, people who choose to remain inaccessible will stay so, but if you’ve been on Twitter for some time, you should agree that they are more likely to read what you have to say because there are more opportunities to @reply and respond to their tweets.

The fact that people decide to become more responsive in Twitter will help them build relationships with their prospects and customers too.

7. Go Beyond Twitter

Twitter is now too significant to overlook, but that doesn’t mean you should underestimate the power of face-to-face communication.

It is easier to establish trust if you directly meet with an individual rather than online. If your brand visibility is important to you, you may want to go offline and visit industry events. Talk to real people.

This kind of interaction will often lead to many great things in the future.

Conclusions

Your existing influence in Twitter certainly matters. However, if you have to start from scratch, the tips above will give you a head start.

A business owner with a good number of followers may be more successful to get people retweet their message, but if you go out and network with people, join in the conversation and post interesting content, I’m not surprised your tweets will spread further.

I witness it everyday. It’s that powerful.

Personal branding is an interesting topic. Chances are different people have different opinions about it. What do you think about personal branding using Twitter? What have you learned so far? Please share your experience so others can learn from it too.

Hendry Lee helps bloggers overcome strategic and technological challenges in starting and growing their blogs.

He also writes about social media on his blog Blog Tips for a Better Blog – Blog Building University. While you are there, download your free eBook and subscribe to the blogging e-course where he reveals his blogging and writing secrets!

Follow Hendry at Twitter: @hendrylee.

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Personal Brand – How to Build Yours In Twitter

In the comment, I hinted about how that hack works — after peeking at the source code. For most people, it appears like magic but really it is quite simple if you understand how different parts interact.

Once you are aware about how a typical system like this works, hopefully you can come up with more ideas to make use of the technology.

What Do You Need?

What appears to be magic actually is a set of tools and electronic devices working together. Each of them is able to communicate with the device next or before it.

There are a few components that work together in the light switch scenario:

1. A computer system with controlling software. Obviously the computer has to be on for it to accept messages and to send them to the right devices. Smart home devices also have programmable controller and remote so signals could also be sent from this remote instead of a computer.
2. A hardware controller. You need an electronic circuit that is able to receive signals from your computer (either via serial or USB port) and respond to it. It can be as simple as an on-off switch. If the device includes support for dimming lights, you will be able to extend the feature to dim instead of just turning on and off. As you see, the controller plays a critical role here.
3. The controlled object. In this case, it is a light. There is nothing special about the object. Just that the signal from the controlling device — most likely computer — instruct the controller to do something that in turn do whatever it is programmed to do to the object.
4. Communication mechanism. The last part of the system is a communication mechanism that lets you send signal to the computer system.

There are many ways to send instruction signals to your computer. Some email clients are able to filter subject line or content body and then run custom command. That means you can control and execute the controlling software wherever you have an email client.

An alternative would be posting a Twitter message (via cellphone or any Twitter client). Using Kwiry and Jott, you may even use your voice to post to Twitter. Ping.fm lets you use cellphone, instant messaging services, and others to send your message to Twitter.

Of course, you are not limited to Twitter. As long as you can fetch the data and process it later with your computer, you can use it as a communication mechanism.

I bet you can come up a few other options right now, can’t you?

How to Control Bedroom Light with Twitter

As a simple example, based on the model above, allow me to explain how to control the light with your cellphone and Twitter.

First of all, the setup requires a controller like Insteon PowerLinc Controller. The controller is able to connect to the computer via a USB interface, which in turn sends signal to a light dimmer. Setup is necessary to identify the device you want to control.

That’s for the hardware and controller part. The next thing is to find a way to setup the software so it sends signal to the controller. iLink Insteon scene management software is available under Linux with both graphical and command line interface.

With the command line version, you can type in command and instruct the controller to send the appropriate signal to the dimmer. Once that works, you need to automate the command.

This is when Twitter plays a role. With the published RSS feed, a simple script can be used to poll the RSS on a regular basis — such as every second. Based on the content of the tweet, the script execute the appropriate command to turn the light on and off.

Of course, you may want to setup a separate Twitter account just for this to avoid confusing your followers with your home automation command.

If you need real-time response, Twitter may not be suitable for this application because that means you have to rely on Twitter and the speed of which it updates the RSS feed. However, controlling devices via Twitter sounds just cool.

Note: Yes, with such setup, you can also send an instruction to turn the light on and off using your instant messaging client if you set that up first, such as using ping.fm.

Possible Applications

Imagination is the limit when it comes to applying this setup to other things. Switching the light on and off may just be the easiest application.

Here are some other ideas to start with:

• Turn another computer on and off. Shutdown can be done with the shutdown command, available in both Windows and Linux. I’m sure there is a similar function with Mac-based computer as basically it is UNIX-based. Turning on the machine is a bit tricky though. But one possible idea would be to enable wake up on LAN feature, both in the motherboard and the BIOS and then trigger the data packet through another computer.
• Brew coffee. Isn’t it great if you are able to turn the coffee machine on so it starts brewing coffee even before you get off the bed? A simple on and off electric circuit can help you. It works pretty much like the light switch scenario. Now even if your coffee maker doesn’t come with a programmable timer, you can have a cup of your favorite coffee ready before you walk out of your bedroom. Of course, the coffee maker has to be loaded with coffee and water and setup in a way that it automatically runs when it is powered.
• Play a song / music / recording. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could come home with your favorite music welcoming you? How about recording your voice and then play it back when someone else in the room? Many media players allow you to run them via command line and specify the name of the music or media files for playback.
• Run software program. It is possible to instruct your computer to execute certain software program, such as performing data backup to another partition or even to another host.
• Adjust room temperature. This can be as simple as turning the air conditioner on or off. More advanced options can be made available if the software supports them.

Basically what you can do depends on the controlling software and hardware.

Home automation is quite a popular topic recently. Thanks to the Internet and various communication protocols, now controlling various devices become easier, although some of the solutions are less elegant than others.

This post may not be particularly useful for mission critical task, but I think you’ll agree it makes a fun project for the weekend.

Leave your ideas and thoughts about it below.

Hendry Lee helps bloggers overcome strategic and technological challenges in starting and growing their blogs.

Twitter is an awesome tool for blog promotion, but how does Twitter marketing work? Read the article to find out. While you are there, download your free blogging eBook and subscribe to the blogging e-course where he reveals his secret about blogging and content writing!

Follow Hendry on Twitter (@hendrylee).

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



Twitter and Home Automation – How Does It Work?

Much of Twitter is about communication with your peers and meeting new people. I’ve seen many social media marketers claim that in fact conversation is the only thing that matters in Twitter.

I won’t go into detail about it in this post, but no matter what people say, marketers can only track numbers. And without tracking, there is no way to measure how effective social media is to your business.

Based on the latest data from Hitwise, Twitter still continues to grow despite outages and other issues. Nielsen reported in October 2008 that Twitter is growing as much as 343% in 12 months.

Twitter’s growth and the ability to drive traffic via Twitter is two different things, but Jason Calacanis, for instance, blogged that Twitter was sending over 20,000 people a month to his web site Mahalo.com.

With that, I bet all marketers, webmasters and publishers will agree that they should take a very serious look at Twitter, especially if they want to tap into new source of audience and engage those users as part of their marketing activities.

The Problem with Tracking Traffic from Twitter

Before I start, let me elaborate a bit about the challenge for tracking Twitter. Feel free to skip this section if you already know it.

One of the greatest things about Twitter is the ability to post and receive updates from different medium, applications and devices. That makes it possible for Twitterers to engage in conversations no matter where they are and without disturbing their work flow too much.

With the flexibility comes the problem though. If your followers click on the link in your tweets to visit your site — in a browser, it leaves a trail. In HTTP, that trail is the Referer header.

A click on a tweet from the Twitter.com web site actually has the browser generate this as part of the HTTP request header:

Referer: http://twitter.com/hendrylee?page=6

By tracing the log file, using log analyzer such as Awstats (available via most web hosting control panel), or web stats package, you will be able to see exactly from which site or page your traffic comes from.

However, it doesn’t tell the whole story for the following reasons:

• Lack of Referer header for traffic from other Twitter clients. Desktop- and phone-based Twitter clients are popular. According to TweetStats, web accounts for about 51% of the whole Twitter apps, so where do the stats for the 49% go?. When someone clicks on your link, it will not carry the Referer header. Your log file and web stats are more likely to track this as direct traffic.
• Syndicated Twitter feed displays the wrong Referer information. As Twitter also has RSS feed, web publishers can syndicate it easily on their web sites, blogs, FriendFeed or even Facebook accounts. When someone clicks on the link in the tweet, the header contains a Referer line, but from the other web sites instead of Twitter.
• It doesn’t track traffic from RSS feed. If your followers decide to follow via RSS in their news readers, or if they subscribe to a keyword-search query via RSS, and then happen to click on the link in the tweet, it will be tracked as either direct traffic — if from a desktop RSS reader, or as traffic from online RSS reader in the Referer line.

How’s that for accuracy? If you are not yet tracking your Twitter traffic, chances are you underestimate the number of visitors that come as the result of your tweets.

Simple Approach to Tracking Twitter

The first solution is very simple. Use URL “shortener” service that supports tracking. Tweetburner is one of them.

Here are a few benefits of using such service:

• Desktop Twitter clients support it. twhirl and TweetDeck allow you to generate short links from the same interface directly. And that makes the process much quicker. Remember about the flow thing I mentioned above?
• It happens automatically. You don’t have to add anything. Once you use Tweetburner (twurl.nl), logging in your account shows you some interesting stats such as clicks, who also shares the link, and referrers of the link. The latter is the sites that syndicate the tweet with the link.
• Track all sources of clicks. Tweetburner solves the issue I explained above regarding Twitter tracking because wherever the tweets appear, any clicks on the link will be tracked.

Another service called cligs features other information such as geotargeting. It is also search engine friendly, i.e. using 301 permanent redirect.

Although it doesn’t give you any information beyond clicks, at the very least you know how effective your tweets are.

Tracking Twitter Clicks with Google Analytics

Most Javascript-based web stats have this feature but for this example I use Google Analytics because it is one of the most powerful and free web stats packages. If you use a different solution, check to make sure this feature exists and how to use it.

Google Analtyics has a feature called URL tagging. With it, you are able to track any online campaigns. The following is a list of accepted variables:

• Source (utm_source). The origin of a referral to a web site. When someone clicks on your web link in Google search result page, Google is the source.
• Medium (utm_medium). Together with source, they provide specific information about the origin of a referral. If you use AdWords to drive traffic from Google, the source is Google and medium is pay per click or adwords.
• Campaign (utm_campaign). The dimension that differentiates product promotions such as “Valentine Sale.”
• Term (utm_term). Keyword that is used to find your page via the search engines.
• Content (utm_content). Content describes the version of an advertisement, usually used in content-targeted advertising and a/b split testing.

For tracking Twitter, we only need the source, medium and campaign dimensions.

You can integrate Google Analytics tags into your URL quite easily with one of the following methods.

The first method is by using Google Analytics URL Builder. It is a simple form that walks you through the necessary fields and generate tagged URL.

Insert the Website URL into the first field and then fill in the source, medium and campaign with “twitter” (without the quotes) or with any unique name that you’d like to assign to track Twitter clicks. Finally hit the Generate URL button to get your tagged link in the field below the button.

Chances are this URL is too lengthy to be used in Twitter. As usual, all you need to do now is shorten the URL with your favorite URL shortening service. Note that if you follow this method, you can use any of your chosen service.

Let’s make it easier. The second method is by using bookmarlet. A bookmarklet is a small Javasript application that is stored as a bookmark in your browser. If you put it in the bookmark toolbar, the service is just one click away.

When clicked, this bookmark will take URL of the active window/tab, add Google Analytics tags, generate a short URL with twurl.nl and add it to the form, ready to be posted to either Twitter or FriendFeed.

javascript:var%20xnSD366z='http://tweetburner.com/links/create?url='+escape(location.href);if(location.href.indexOf('?')>0){xnSD366z+=escape('&')}else{xnSD366z+='?'}xnSD366z+=escape('utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=twitter');window.open(xnSD366z,'_blank','width=500,height=320,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,status=yes,toolbar=no,location=no');xnSD366z.focus();

Cligs also has a bookmarklet that you can adapt to include the above Google Analytics tags. Unlike Tweetburner’s bookmarlet above, it only displays a short URL with options to post to Twitter or identi. Here is the modified cligs’ bookmarklet code, for your convenience.

javascript:(function(){var%20Awg12UDv='http://cli.gs/cligs/new?url='+escape(location.href);if(location.href.indexOf('?')>0){Awg12UDv+=escape('&')}else{Awg12UDv+='?'}Awg12UDv+=escape('utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=twitter');window.open(Awg12UDv+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title));})();

Create a new bookmark with the code as the location.

Much easier, right? The drawback of this method is, you can’t assign a different campaign to the tag as easily as using the URL builder tool.

If you often need to customize the utm_campaign variable, use the following bookmarklet instead.

For Tweetburner:

javascript:var%20xnSD366zCampaign=window.prompt('Enter campaign name','twitter');var%20xnSD366z='http://tweetburner.com/links/create?url='+escape(location.href);if(location.href.indexOf('?')>0){xnSD366z+=escape('&')}else{xnSD366z+='?'}xnSD366z+=escape('utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=');xnSD366z+=escape(xnSD366zCampaign);window.open(xnSD366z,'_blank','width=500,height=320,scrollbars=yes,resizable=yes,status=yes,toolbar=no,location=no');xnSD366z.focus();

Cligs:

javascript:(function(){var%20Awg12UDvCampaign=window.prompt('Enter campaign name','twitter');var%20Awg12UDv='http://cli.gs/cligs/new?url='+escape(location.href);if(location.href.indexOf('?')>0){Awg12UDv+=escape('&')}else{Awg12UDv+='?'}Awg12UDv+=escape('utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=');Awg12UDv+=escape(Awg12UDvCampaign);window.open(Awg12UDv+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title));})();

Either of them will prompt you for the campaign name before shortening the tagged URL.

Note: Those bookmarklets have been tested with both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 6. Due to how WordPress format the links, it is impossible to provide drag and drop links for the bookmarklet without modifying WordPress code. This page provides the drag-and-drop version of the bookmarklets though.

Everytime you stumble on a page that you want to tweet, click on the bookmark. Now the shortened URL will carry the Google Analytics tags.

That’s it. Google Analytics will automatically detect those tags and display the report showing how many clicks occur from Twitter. The number includes clicks from Twitter web site (your profile page), any Twitter clients, syndicated feed in FriendFeed, Facebook or even other people’s web sites.

Taking It to the Next Level with Funnel Visualization and Goals

Let’s say that you have a specific campaign to drive traffic from Twitter. The campaign is to generate leads for your business by offering a white paper download. Isn’t it nice if you are able to not only track clicks, but also the number of those visitors that register? What if you can track the percentage of visitors from Twitter that abandon the page and never see the sign up form — presuming the landing page is not the registration page?

The good news is, you can.

Goals and funnels in Google Analytics allow you to do exactly that. The detail about how to do this is out of the scope of this post, but you can find more information from Google Analytics Help pages.

Let me summarize the steps you need to take to get this kind of information though:

1. Create a landing page, intermediary pages, and goal page. If your web content management system doesn’t include the Google Analytics tracking code on those pages, you should insert it on every page manually.
2. Setup funnels and goals. A funnel is a series of pages through which a visitor must pass before conversion. A goal is the destination page a visitor must land on to assume conversion.
3. Tag the landing page with source, medium, and campaign tags.
4. Shorten the URL. Use the above tool to speed this up. It allows you to do the third and fourth steps with one click.
5. Use the short URL in your tweets.

That’s it. Now you are able to funnel visualization, conversions, conversion rate, abandoned funnels and even goal value if you enter it while setting the goals and funnels in the second step above.

If you use one of the URL shortening services above, you also get the analytics data from those services besides Google Analytics’ report.

Conclusions

Now that marketers begin to understand Twitter, and with the growth of the micro blogging platform itself, marketers and web publishers are starting to generate significant traffic from Twitter. With the above method, you will be able to at least track how many clicks are coming from Twitter beyond those from Twitter’s website. That means you are able to track clicks from syndicated Twitter RSS feeds, from desktop- and phone-based clients, and others as well.

By setting up funnels and goals in your Google Analytics account, you will also be able to get user behavior and conversion data. With those numbers in hand, marketers can now measure the effectiveness of their campaigns and know where to spend their money and effort on.

Final note: Still related to tracking, I’ve created a WordPress plugin that makes in-content RSS links trackable with Google Analytics. Currently FeedBurner only tracks clicks on the item title. When you create a blog post as part of a larger promotion, clicks on the call to action and other links within RSS feed — as a separate campaign — are not properly tracked. The plugin, which I called RSS Feed Campaign Tagger uses the same method I explained above to track links within your RSS feed.

Hendry Lee helps bloggers overcome strategic and technological challenges in starting and growing their blogs. He also writes about social media tips on his blog Blog Tips for a Better Blog – Blog Building University. While you are there, download your free eBook and subscribe to the blogging e-course where he reveals his secret about blogging and content writing!

Follow Hendry on Twitter (@hendrylee).

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.



How to Track Twitter Clicks and Get Conversion Data