Hope this helps !

Thanks!

I have been on Twitter for a few months now and am getting some decent traffic to my website as a result.

But I never once considered using the Twitter search feature to look for prospects in need.

Good stuff man!

If you’re using social media monitoring for prospecting, I’d recommend a process like this:

#1 create searches in Twitter with phrases your prospects use
#2 research your prospects– get contact info beyond Twitter (email, phone, linkedin profile), tag them, score them based on their twitter activity and the website they’re associated with
#3 engage them as a human, add value to the conversation, don’t spam
#4 once you’ve established a rapport and qualify a Twitter contact, decide if they’re really a prospect. And when you pass them to your sales force for follow-up, and always do so with a warm introduction and their consent.

Thoughtful post today! (and LONG! … but so worth the read!)

To say social media is a powerful tool for small businesses is an understatement. And to say larger companies like infoGROUP (infoUSA) need to be exploring these is absolutely correct. And we are!

I think your twitter example is a strong one – a good example of placing some bait in the social sphere; unfortunately, none of the bigger fish took a bite.

One important thing to note that might help explain that lack of response… your network knew to look for you – specifically. And since they have an established connection, they responded thoughtfully. With hundreds of tweets using the phrase “direct mail” every day, fishing one response out of the hundreds can be tricky. I’m sure many tweets like yours go untouched (untweeted?). Here at infoGROUP (infoUSA), we do monitor Twitter, Facebook and several hundred other social spaces for opportunities such as this to engage with prospects and social audiences about our products and services.

We love that you pointed out TweetDeck. We’ve been using this for month’s to monitor keywords relevant to our own products and services. Social spaces can be very unforgiving though, so we would augment your message with a cautionary one: engage and respond thoughtfully. Our corporate social media training program is working to empower our employees to carry messages like these into social spaces, but to do so with an understanding of the lasting digital footprint they will leave behind. We’re not afraid to make mistakes; we just want to walk with confidence when we can and in the direction we desire.

We also love the Google Alerts and TweetBeep… GREAT ways to keep alerted about mentions and keywords… in fact, it’s how we tripped across your blog post today!)

Customer Service and Retention… now these are some often overlooked applications for social media, and some great advice! We’re not quite there yet. Our Certified Social sales force is helping us figure out the best “social” avenues for connecting with our current customers and how to use those channels in combination with existing ones to better serve them, and hopefully keep them longer.

So thanks again for the great post… and we’d love to connect you with some of our “good direct mail advertising peeps.” Just let us know how we can help.

Best regards,

Bryan D. Jennewein – Director of Social Media
infoGROUP, Inc. Marketing and Communications
5711 S. 86th Cir
Omaha, Nebraska 68127
402.537.7743 (office)
@ Tweet2Market
facebook dot com/bryanjennewein