I was reminded of my first experience in the commercial Internet space the other day as I drove through Sebastopol, the headquarters of O’Reilly.

Most people don’t know how hard it was to get on the Internet at the beginning. Or that Internet usage was essentially mono-tasking back then. Thank you Marc Andreessen and the Mosaic and Netscape crews for helping to fix that!

The Internet most of us know really started around 1995. My first experience was about 5 years before that, when I was amazed to learn that you could send an email to steve@next.com, even if you were walt@ashtontate.com. You see, the first email systems didn’t talk to each other. We had internal email on Novell, but you couldn’t talk to anyone outside your own company.

I started using public email in the mid 80s with MCI Mail, which was the first commercial email service. (Wow, check out these early TV advertisements from MCI Mail!)

There were a couple of other systems around (AOL didn’t even exist yet!). MCI mail didn’t use names for email addresses, but rather numbers – similar to phone numbers. But systems like MCI couldn’t talk to other systems like Compuserve, and the only other email was in academe, which had been using the non-commercial Internet for years.

In 1994, when I first learned of Mosaic – the precursor to Netscape – I was running marketing and product management for a company that made scientific software. Most of our customers were at research facilities, and they were on the Internet. We had a crude gateway to send email from our Novell system to our Internet users (anybody remember PMail and Mercury?). And naturally, we thought the Internet would be a great venue for marketing our software.

So I drove up to Sebastopol and visited the nice people at O’Reilly (which was pretty small in those days!). We worked out an advertising agreement – probably one of the first in the industry. I had one condition: they had to help me get my own computer on the Internet. Now you may think that was easy, but it wasn’t. In fact, the folks at O’Reilly couldn’t do it, and so we never advertised with them.

In the early days, we didn’t have DSL or cable Internet. Unless you were in an academic institution that connected via high speed lines (like T1s), you had to connect to the Internet via slow modems. But it wasn’t obvious how to do that! You couldn’t just dial a number and connect, like you could for MCI or later AOL. You had to run software on your computer that would connect through some magic called PPP.

Those were pretty primitive times – we were still using Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups. Windows 95 was just hitting the streets. These versions of Windows didn’t directly support Internet connections the way all modern versions do.

AOL and ISPs like Netcom brought wide Internet availability to the US, and companies like ClariNet Communications helped pave the way for commercial use. I’ll write about ClariNet in the future – I ran marketing for the company from 1995-1999. We provided the first commercial content on the Internet.

Finally, when you’re getting all frustrated at how slow the Internet is, you can be thankful that you didn’t have to use these early PPP connections, because before the World Wide Web, you could essentially do only one thing at a time! Before Yahoo, Google, or even AltaVista, we could still search through Internet data. These searches weren’t at all like what we’re used to today, but we had Archie, to search FTP sites, and WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers). Remember, there were no websites yet, so “information” was stored on FTP servers and Newsgroups – also online databases that WAIS could access.

The first time I used Mosaic, I was awestruck – “Wow, I can do 2-3 things at the same time!” Even though the modem speeds limited what you could do, just being able to search (Archie) while looking at email (PMail) was amazing.

I just don’t know how we managed to survive. Really I don’t.

Oh yeah… I’ve written a lot about volunteering. I used to speak at job support groups quite frequently. Wrote about what I learned, tips for people, etc. They’re all here on my blog. One of my articles made it into O’Reilly Guide article about Interviewing a few months ago, and it’s a pretty steady source of traffic to my blog. I guess they’re not angry at me for not advertising with them . [In the interest of full disclosure, my blog isn't owned by anybody, and doesn't generate a penny of income. No special interest groups here!]

PS: OK, previous paragraph – except for disclaimer – is all wrong. O’Reilly still hates me. My article is mentioned on a site owned by Margaret F. Dikel (thanks Margaret), and it’s the Riley Guide, not O’Reilly. Oy vey. Riley, O’Reilly, they’re all the same to me. [That was a joke, or an attempt at a joke, anyway.]

I’m a lifelong learner. If I had to describe myself in one word, it would be curious. And once again, I’ve found that learning something in one discipline can be important in another. In this case, implementing DemandForce at the auto shop I ran for a while has turned out to be important knowledge for a new project I’m starting on. One company was in auto maintenance, and the other is in people maintenance. Except for the second word, I don’t think you could think of two more distinct business lines.

I wrote briefly about DemandForce here. We used it in an auto shop I was helping to run. The owners wanted to adopt social media technology, and they desperately needed somebody to establish good systems for their company (everything from safety to accounting).

The essential elements of DemandForce are simple:

• Keep track of all customers – when they were in, what they had done, their vehicles, and the vehicle mileage (as of the last service).
• Send reminder notes to customers about scheduled maintenance – based on a calculation of the mileage they drive per year. (For example, if the customer has a 5-year-old car with 60,000 miles, the software assumes 12,000 per year, or 1,000 per month. So when it’s approaching three months since the customer has been in, they get a reminder about changing their oil.)
• Provide a thank you email to customers after each service.
• Provide a simple way for customers to rate the service.
• Certify those reviews – because DemandForce could access our shop software database – as coming from real customers

Let’s look at the benefits, first to the customer (how many marketeers start there, rather than concentrating on the benefits to the company??):

1. Customers don’t want to keep track of their automobiles – they just want them to work reliably. Keeping track of their repair history, and matching that with the car’s expected mileage means the software can send reminders for major services. For example, “It’s time for your 100,000 mile checkup. This service includes the following things…”
2. Customers don’t know that certain maintenance functions should be done, say in the spring or fall. So most are happy to get a reminder to change their windshield wipers before the rainy season. And very few have any concept that some of these reminders can save them a lot of money. For example, most cars with timing belts need to have them changed at regular intervals (commonly 60-100,000 miles). If you don’t change the timing belt and it breaks, some engines can be damaged beyond repair.
3. Wow, you sent me a thank you note? That’s incredible! I thought you were just grease monkeys. You made me feel like you appreciate my business!
4. Sure, you gave me great service – delivered more than you promised and returned my car earlier than I expected. And I’ve got my wheels back! I’m going to give you a great review because I want all my friends to know how smart I am to use your services.
5. When I go looking for reviews on service providers, I always wonder if they are real. You guarantee that these are real reviews from real customers. That means that I can trust them when I’m looking for a provider. Thanks for making my job easier!

OK, the customer is happy because we provided real value, and all they had to do was bring their car in and give us their email address (DemandForce can also do postcards, but that’s much more expensive).

Now, what does it do for me, the business owner?

1. Increases business – a lot. People forget to service their cars. They don’t know what services they need. But a car is a big investment, and most people want to take care of this costly friend. And this marketing technique is seen as friendly, rather than invasive.
2. It helps ensure that customers are driving safe vehicles. We want them to live to come in again…
3. It makes for happy customers. They feel valued. They appreciate that you care about their opinions. Happy customers refer your business to friends. Isn’t this what viral marketing is all about? It’s a one-to-many relationship. One customer tells five friends. Each of them tells five friends, and so forth. In a way, it’s almost like multi-level marketing, but we don’t have to pay anybody.
4. My business gets more reviews, and I’m asking people to review my service at the peak of their emotional high. “Ol Daisy is purring like she used to. I’m happy! Life is good!” At the auto shop, we averaged almost 1 review per day. So in five months, we generated 72 reviews. If you look at Yelp ratings for a typical businesses, you’ll see that this is a really large number of reviews.
5. More good reviews means more new customers. Since these are certified reviews, Google likes them. People looking for auto repair in Walnut Creek can immediately see that I run the best shop in town. The more computer literate people are, the more likely they are to find me this way. Reviews beat advertising every time.

Now let me tie this all together.

I’m now working with a company that provides home health care, mainly for seniors. There’s no equivalent of DemandForce for this industry. DemandForce only covers a few disciplines: auto repair, chiropractic, dental, optometry, and spas. I wish they covered home health care – our population is aging rapidly, and it’s really hard to find unbiased reviews of suppliers. And the stakes are high – it’s one thing to kill Ol’ Daisy, and quite another to kill Grandma.

I can’t duplicate certifications for reviews – and it’s important, wish I could – but I can build many of the other features and functions of DemandForce, and tailor them for a home healthcare business. Most companies that have implemented CRMs (customer relationship management systems) use them for sales and sales prospecting. Not many businesses use CRM systems to inform and remind their clients. And the review process for most companies has been left to Yelp. Yelp has many problems, and is not well liked by most businesses. Many people question the validity of their reviews. And what’s more important is that a large percentage of people who leave reviews on Yelp do it when they’re upset. Remember, our DemandForce reviews were done when people were on an emotional high.

Once again, I’ve learned that learning is good. It’s good just for the sake of learning. If you’re smart, everything you learn can be used somewhere else, at some time. I’ve found this to be true all through my career. So if you’re a learner, take heart. Often dreams can be justified.

Most people I talk to about blogging are pretty scared about the whole concept.

• “What can I write that people will want to read?”
• “I don’t have anything to say…”
• “Can I write about golf?”

I’m going to share some of my statistics with you, which may give you some ideas. But first, I’d like to share some of my original goals and how they evolved over time.

When I started writing, I really just wanted to talk about some of my experiences in the industry. I thought it would be fun for people who were involved or at least interested in the history of the industry. So I wrote things like “How spreadsheets came to have iterative calculations” and “Why Bill Gates is rich and I’m not.”

These posts were fun to write, and some of them got pretty good reader statistics. So they were rewarding all on their own.

After a little while, I started speaking and writing about personal branding. I wrote a lot on this topic. Some of these ideas were borrowed, but most were a synthesis of what I had researched in my reading on the Internet – and what I discovered on my own.

As I got into this topic, and I started doing more speaking, I found that people really wanted to learn how to do things. True, I had some followers who loved my stories about a part of microcomputer history that hadn’t been written about before. But more and more, people were coming to my website from Google searches and mentions on other websites.

So I started writing more “How To” posts. Most of these have gotten consistently good readership numbers – they just keep chugging along with 10 or 20 visits per day.

I don’t promote my blog, and I haven’t written much in the past two years, so it’s not a heavy readership site. Nevertheless, as of this writing in July 2011, I’ve had almost 37,000 page views. Think how much work it would be to network with 37,000 people!! I average about 59-60 views per day.

Here are some numbers:

(I would have cut the list off after the 10th item, but I really wanted to get that William F. Buckley article in there.)

Almost all these articles are “How To” posts!

How do people get to my site? Some people subscribe, some see my tweets or my Facebook and Linkedin updates.

As you can see, my biggest referring site is RileyGuide.com. I’m one of many authors featured in an article for job seekers. StumbleUpon.com was a one-time fluke – it was about an article I wrote about a new social networking site, and many of the beta users of the site promoted my article. But in aggregate, my biggest referring site is JibberJobber.com, which is a wonderful website for job seekers, hosted by my friend Jason Alba.

WordPress also gives you statistics on search terms used to get to your website:

What does this teach us (me)?

• LinkedIn ought to be paying me for supporting their users
• Microsoft should be paying me for supporting their mail merge users
• An awful lot of people are searching for me (so where are they, anyway?)

Seriously, I think it’s easy to see how you could use these statistics to improve the readership of your blog. It’s clear that more people are looking for LinkedIn help than my stories about the birth of the nation. I could envision writing many more How To articles… It’s also a good way to locate points of confusion. For example, I’d bet that all 158 people who searched for “sandwich board” were pretty disappointed when they came to my article about blogging for jobs, which included a picture of a woman with a sandwich board.

But remember: your blog is a great manifestation of your personality. Sure, write about golf. Write about your experiences in life – everyone has something interesting to say to others. If you think about what you do during the day, idle thoughts that cross your mind, you’ll find that even you have something interesting to say.

I just finished with my latest gig. Would you believe a 53-year-old startup? Seems like a contradiction, doesn’t it?

What did I learn? Even a third-generation company can seem like a startup. Same challenges, same problems, same leadership dynamics. And even though you can’t get much further from software hi-tech, this auto repair business wasn’t all that different.

I was working with some friends who own a large auto repair business. Together with his wife, the current owner, who inherited the business from his father, is preparing to pass the business along to his son. He “sorta” gets high-tech, but his son picks up techie stuff really fast.

And if you think auto repair isn’t high-tech, you’re mistaken. In fact, this was one of the most sophisticated businesses I’ve ever worked with.

You’re probably thinking about the computerized gizmos repair facilities need to work on cars now. That’s only a small part of the picture. Behind the scenes, we ran shop management software (ProfitBoost), which tracked every job, every customer, every minute the techs worked on cars. And it is based on a true cost accounting model, which means that we knew beforehand the profitability of every job we did. This also allowed us to focus on the more profitable business, and to avoid high-risk, low-profit jobs, even when they were more fun.

But that’s still the tip of the iceberg. The shop management software was connected to QuickBooks and DemandForce, which is similar to Yelp – but without its baggage. Every day, all the invoices and payments went into QuickBooks – so it was always up-to-date. And for every job we completed, an email went out to the customer, thanking them for their patronage and asking them to rate their experience. We averaged almost one review a day after I implemented this program – and these reviews were “certified,” which improved their Google juice. (By certified, I mean that DemandForce could verify that the review came from an actual customer and an actual repair job.)

Oh, and when maintenance work came due, DemandForce automatically sent reminders to the customer.

Wow! I wish I could have done all that for some of the supposed high-tech companies I ran or worked for…

We were running a true CRM, using some of the best and most practical social media techniques, and our repair ticket tracking was amazing. And this was an auto repair facility run by mechanics, not some hoity-toity high-tech absurdly-funded startup.

But in a sense, it was a startup, because we implemented almost all of this in the few months I was there, and they were all off-the-shelf solutions. That’s exactly what startups do.

If you’re wondering about the car picture in this post: well this car is only 48 years old, so I’m cheating a bit. I drove one of these when I was in high school. It was a supercharged Studebaker Avanti. It still looks current today. What a timeless design by the Raymond Loewy studios.

I used to speak frequently about how to get found on the Internet. One of my suggestions was to get a GMail account. This often ended up in a vigorous debate. Seems many Yahoo mail users like their email service.

Sorry, I ain’t one of them. I’ve had a Yahoo email account for many years. I hardly ever use it, because it’s so bad. Why?

• Really intrusive, annoying, abusive, and totally ineffective ads. This has led me over the years to find new and better ways to avoid their ads, so the level that gets through to me now only obnoxious.
• Unpredictable delivery – I’ve heard, and experienced, many horror stories about Yahoo mail. When you send mail from Yahoo, there’s no telling when/if it will arrive. And if you’re trying to receive email – well, you have the same problem.

Hence the reason for this post. If anybody at Yahoo is listening, here’s my horror story for tonight. I’ve been waiting for over 45 minutes to receive email from a credit card company I use for which I need to change my password. I’m in a catch-22… The credit card company, which is almost as inept as Yahoo, is broken. I cannot change my password through their web server, because some bug in their code brings me to an error page. Guess I’m their only customer, which is why they’ve never run into this problem before.

OK, the fallback is that this credit card supplier will email me a change password confirmation message. I have no doubt they did, in fact they sent two. And maybe they’ll show up tomorrow. But for tonight, fuggedaboutit.

All this might be excused if Yahoo wasn’t one of the biggest sources of spam on the Internet. But they are, so their efforts at blocking spam are kinda wonky.

While I’m at it, here’s another story one of my listeners once told me: she almost lost her daughter’s scholarship because of Yahoo mail delays. Or a small business owner who told me they lost business because of Yahoo mail delays. And yes, I’ve personally verified this. I can send mail from multiple email accounts. I can watch for myself how long it takes from GMail (instantaneous), and several other email accounts (instantaneous). Then there’s old Yahoo, redefining snail mail to now include an electronic version that rivals the good ol’ USPS.

Kombucha CPG =Consumer Packaged Goods

The simple answer is NO. Same excitement, same communal spirit, same partner advantages and gripes. In my case, we even had a food scientist who could easily have been a lead programmer or architect in a different setting. Same personality characteristics.

I guess this shouldn’t be surprising. People, after all, are still people. All startup founders I’ve known work long and hard. The early days are like a honeymoon – everyone is still getting to know each other, and everyone is amazed at how much they love working with their partners. But even at the beginning, if you’re watching you can just make out seeds being planted and germinating. I’ve always said that people eventually become caricatures of themselves, and this is especially true in startups. Those seeds become BIG weeds.

Which aspects are similar? Start at the beginning: you have a dream. You play around with it for a while. Test the edges of the amoeba to see what shape it is. You come to believe that you can succeed where so many have failed; that this partnership is different from the others you’ve known. So you start bringing all the ideas together, typically in a business plan. That tends to get everyone focused on the same goals. So far, the high-tech and CPG (consumer packaged goods) companies could be twins.

Typically, you then start working on infrastructure: phones, file sharing, a bookkeeping solution, computers for everyone, etc. If you’re still self-financed, which is pretty typical, you have to do all these things without spending much money. In my case, I set us all up on DropBox for file sharing. Then I signed up for a phone system – RingCentral.com – and got us all office phones. At this stage, everyone can (and was) working from home. The financial investment for all of this was trivial – even for the “professional” phone (PBX) system. And yes, the high-tech and CPG companies are still pretty parallel.

At this point, you’ll start to go your own paths – how you build the product, and how you distribute it. I found that the natural foods distribution channels were familiar – surely different from when I saw in packaged software, but the concepts were about the same.

The two roads converged again: depending on your financing strategy (and luck), you may now be at a point where you can pay your employees. So you have to find a payroll solution (really, you don’t want to do this yourself). Plus, if your product is close to its launch, you’re going to have to think about the various forms of insurance you need – and this is surprisingly non-trivial. In our startup, we chose to use Paychex to do payroll and tax reporting. In the past I used Gevity (now TriNet), which was a virtual HR service (technically, a Professional Employment Organization – PEO). The advantage of a PEO is that all employees are leased from the PEO. While you handle all hiring/firing, etc., the paychecks say TriNet, not your company name. You may be able to get better health insurance coverage this way, and you’ll have access to the HR functions you wouldn’t have without a dedicated HR person. And a side-benefit: if you go out of business, you and your employees will still qualify for COBRA (which would otherwise cease with the termination of the company).

Let’s talk about the founders: are high-tech founders different from our CPG founders? I think not. You still have dreamers, and startups still tend to be created by ADD, or worse Asperger’s, individuals. Both types of startups need somebody like me, who can corral the dreams into a plan, keep focus going, and actually ship the dream that has become a real product.

So my answer is that, while the bill of materials was a lot different, the basics of a high-tech company and a CPG company are pretty similar. I never felt out of place during the creation of our company and product. It was far easier for me to move from one startup to another than it was for some of my partners who came from big, resource-rich companies to this little company that had very shallow pockets.

And for me, it was still home. I thrive in the chaos of a startup. It seems that I was born with the ability to wade through all the (sometimes conflicting) goals, data, dreams, etc. and come up with a clear plan with defined executables and metrics.

Picture by Mike Dierken

Having just left a startup in which I was a founding partner, I’m going to shift the emphasis of this blog – at least for now – from branding to startups. This is the first in a series of articles I plan to write.

…And I’m changing my personal branding statement to “I put the start in startups.”

In my long and varied career, I’ve spent more time in startups than in established companies. Let me relate an experience I had in my first post-graduate school job – I think you’ll understand immediately why I hated big companies.

When I was about to leave graduate school, with an MBA in Computer Applications from a top school (NYU), I was introduced to the Chairman of Bloomingdales. He asked me to come work as the liaison between Finance and EDP (now IT). That should have been my first red flag – here were two essential groups, and the managers weren’t able to work with each other. I later came to realize that the retail business was riddled with nepotism, and this was a prime example. (I don’t mean to say the individual managers were incompetent or bad people, just that the new finance people  didn’t have the experience they should have had for a business that size.)

That position never materialized, so I was put in the Internal Audit department, which was run by Bloomie’s token woman manager. This woman never did a single day’s work in the entire time I worked for the company. She had one employee whose primary job was finding her an apartment in New York City. Too bad, because there was a real glass ceiling in those days, and people like this, who took advantage of the need for business to diversify, set back the women’s cause by a lot.

Working for her was pretty bad. It was also bad sharing a closet with 2 other office workers, but that’s another story – and after all, the closet did have a window, so I really shouldn’t complain.

Starting to get the picture? Well here’s some icing for the cake. I was given an assignment to create some cost accounting information so the cost of charge sales could be accurately computed and allocated among departments. My marching orders were “do the worst job you can – we have to comply with Federated (the owner of Bloomingdale’s) requests, but since we’re their most important store and we don’t want to do this, screw them.”

Being intrinsically stubborn (a good trait for a startup maven, but not so good at Bloomie’s), I ignored these instructions, and did pretty thorough job. Dilbert could have written the script: I wasn’t allowed any access to the computerized records of sales, and so my “little” task required a lot of extra work by the already overtaxed sales audit team. And in the end, I got soundly criticized for doing too good a job.

Fast forward to the first startup I worked at a few years later. In a startup, you do whatever you need to do to make the company successful. Everybody is involved, and everyone works collaboratively. Small and startup means that everybody has opinions about the projects their partners do, and decisions are generally communal. In startups, you don’t have some dumb shit telling you to do stupid projects. And since you own the company yourself (or have stock options – but in any case you’re motivated to have the company succeed), you try to do your projects as well as possible.

I don’t know about you, but one of my biggest frustrations is doing a project that gets put on the shelf, or one that has no value and is just busy-work. That simply doesn’t exist in startups. In this small, naïve environment, everything you do has an impact in the success or failure of the enterprise. I need that to get motivated. I need to see that what I do will have an impact on the business, and by the way, I don’t want to wait five years to see it.

So, when asked why I hang around in startups, which have their own drawbacks, my answer is simply this: I like the enthusiasm, the naiveté, the collaborative spirit. I like seeing the fruits of my labors. I like being accountable. I like being able to change course instantly if the original is headed for disaster. I like working with groups that genuinely enjoy working together, where you don’t have to live with politics and people who think their job is to keep their job. Focus on the product or service, and things pretty much align themselves. At the end of the day, you can come home and say that you contributed to the (hopeful) success of your company.

Almost one year ago, I got found. Getting found is what I had been blogging about for the previous year. In fact, my personal branding statement was “I help you get found on the Internet.”

And then it happened to me.

One of my articles caught the attention of an entrepreneur in Los Angeles who wanted to start a beverage company. He was looking for information on Google Reader, and he got to my blog through a Google search. (Isn’t that what getting found is all about?) He spent some time on my blog, and liked what I’d been writing about, and asked me to join the company.

So the past year has been a real roller coaster. An experience of a lifetime. And it has taught me many lessons.

I left the startup this week. It had consumed me, as most startups will, 24 x 7 for almost a year. But for personal reasons, it was time to move on, so I’m back to writing on my blog! If you’re curious about what we were doing, you can look at the website here. (I expect the site to change over time since I only got the first page implemented. So if you are reading this post some time after I published it, the link may not make sense.)

I’m not clear yet about the direction of my blog going forward: I’d like to write about some of the collaboration tools I implemented for our startup, but I may come back to personal branding at some point. Do you have any suggestions?

Twitter can be an awesome research tool. Does that surprise you? And so can Facebook – and probably dozens of other social networks I haven’t tapped into yet.

Not long ago, I got involved with a startup that is creating a new beverage – it’s a unique new Kombucha. Every founder thinks their product is unique and new, but honestly, this one really is. I say that because almost all Kombuchas taste like vinegar – but the one we’re working on doesn’t. If you’re wondering what Kombucha is, you’re not alone: it’s a fermented tea that contains “stuff that’s good for you.” Here’s a Wikipedia article that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about Kombucha.

Before I get into how we’re using Twitter and Facebook, I want to say how I got involved with this startup. I have often written about using your blog to find work or consulting assignments. Well, that’s exactly what happened here. One of the founders of the startup I’m helping commented on a blog article I’d written about how publishing can help our personal branding.

Now I’ve never worked in consumer packaged goods, and I’d never tasted Kombucha before – and if you knew me, you’d know I’m not a health food nut. But I do know marketing, and I’ve been participating in Web 2.0, whatever that is, for some time.

What I discovered is that there are lots of people writing about Kombucha – there are sometimes hundreds of tweets every day on Twitter, and there are hundreds of fan pages on Facebook. So I started watching for the word Kombucha on Twitter – and to generate a history of these tweets, I feed them into Google Reader as an RSS feed. (I’ve written about how to do that here.)

We learned a lot from this exercise. Several Kombucha producers tweet, and many people who might be early adopters of a new product have a strong presence on Twitter (and blog about their passion for the drink). We also got a lot of basic competitive information from searching through company and fan pages on Facebook.

How does this apply to you?

• If you’re looking for a job, you can do exactly what I did for any target companies. See what people are saying about those companies. You’ll be able to formulate a better strategy for approaching the companies, and you’ll know far more about them if you get an interview.
• If you’re looking for consulting work, track your competing consultants, and also target companies, as just described.
• If you’re still writing, and hoping to get found (as I did), you can use Twitter and Facebook to augment your subject matter expertise – substantially.

You can share information with co-workers or success team members by making Twitter lists – select the “good” people to follow, put them in a list, and then tell your associates how to find the list. I may write more about these lists, but for now, check out this article Robert Scoble wrote.

Yes, there’s a lot of crap on both Twitter and Facebook. But the real winner figures out how to weed through the junk to find the treasures. You can do it – you just need to follow the guides I’ve written and put some work into your research. We now have information that was never available to marketers before – you can talk directly to people who would be likely early adopters of your product, and it doesn’t cost a dime.

An awful lot of information passes out of Twitter into obscurity every day. Contrary to most sites, where what you write exists forever, tweets are temporal. That’s usually not a bad idea – who wants to keep a history of somebody else’s bowel movements?

Aha! But there’s also a valuable stuff getting lost. So, if you want to keep a record of tweets, you can easily do it in Google Reader.

Why?

1. I keep a record of my own tweets. Can’t bear to see them die – no, really I do it so I can make sure I don’t embarrass myself by contradicting an earlier tweet.
2. I track market research topics. Twitter can be an absolutely amazing source of market information. I’m working with a team that’s creating a new beverage. Turns out that lots of people are tweeting about this type of beverage. Some of the tweets are really pretty good, so I’m keeping them.

How?

There’s probably other ways to do this, but here’s how I do it:

1. Go to the Twitter search page: http://search.twitter.com.
2. Search for something. For example, you could search for “personal branding.”
3. When you get your results page, you’ll see an RSS logo with a link that says “Feed for this query.”
4. Hit the link, and you’ll get the normal RSS signon screen. Please see this post and this other post for instructions on setting up Google Reader – I’ve already written extensively about it there.

If you want to do an RSS feeds of just your own tweets, you can do that from your Twitter home page (e.g. http://twitter.com/wfeigenson). Just look for the RSS feed button.

Remember, once you’ve done this, your tweets will stay in your personal knowledge base forever. Great, and free market research! I’ve written about the value of using Google Reader as your own personal knowledge base here.

Oh, you can also use this to research job opportunities – just set up searches for the companies you’re following.

Keywords vs. Hashtags

Many people use “hashtags” on Twitter. When you see something like this: “#personalbranding”, that means that somebody or maybe lots of bodies have coalesced around a term that describes something they’re interested in, and they’re using a standard keyword to identify tweets that are on their topic. Then, you can go to http://twubs.com and put that hashtag in the search box, and you can watch every tweet as it comes into Twitter – if it includes the hashtag. (Well ok, you can do this at Twitter as well, but it doesn’t update in real-time – you have to keep refreshing the screen.) This is real-time search, and if you haven’t read about it, this is what has Google staying up late at night. They’re much more vulnerable to losing the real-time search business to Twitter than they are to losing the big search market to Microsoft.

These real-time Twitter displays played a crucial role in broadcasting information about the Iranian elections, among other topics.

Very cool, and with practical implications for you if you’re in an area that’s changing rapidly.

The downside of hashtags is that many Twitter users don’t know how to use them. So you may miss things you’d get using keyword search. But the solution to that is to create searches for both, and stuff the resulting RSS feed for both searches into Google Reader. (Twitter, why don’t you find #personalbranding in a search for personalbranding?????)