Don’t bombard me with a “Four tires for the price of three” sale.
Find me on the side of the road and help me change my flat tire!

• Old, status quo marketing: “Here’s my stuff. Buy my stuff!”
• New, cool-kid marketing: “Here’s an exact solution to your exact problem!”

Here’s how to make your company, product, service kick ass with Twitter!

The perfect example:

On Tuesday, Nov 15, 2011, I Tweeted that I had shared a couple of WordPress e-commerce alternatives with a client:

Five minutes later @Cart66 (a WordPress e-commerce plugin developer) replied to my Tweet with the following message:

Cart66 was on the ball. They offered a specific solution to my specific circumstance and they offered to answer any questions. They replied to me in 5 minutes… 5 minutes! Dude, that’s fast! And because they answered so quickly the topic was still fresh in my mind. I have to admit I was really surprised at how quickly anybody* replied.

They weren’t selling, they were solving. And that kicks ass!

Use Twitter’s search engine http://twitter.com/search to find your industry’s problems – and solve them. Never before in the history of marketing and advertising has any company been able to know – in real time – what customers are actually freaking out about. Twitter allows you to search your industry, as well as existing and potential clients, and offer assistance!

Find me on the side of the road and help me change my flat tire!

*By the way, @Cart66 was the only WordPress e-commerce plugin developer that replied.

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Chris Brogan’s speech at New England XPO (excerpts):

1. Mobile matters a great deal!
2. 16pt plain-text “rules” in mobile, especially as consumers age.
3. Web-enable your store’s location: Google.com/Places (add your physical store).
4. >10% of complaints about a store experience – actually Tweeted from within the store
5. Facebook: fastest-growing segment is 31-60 year olds, mostly women (to look at other people’s grandkids and kids)
6. Email marketing: no more than 250 words in your newsletter – it’s the 140 character mentality.
7. Just “First Name” and “email addy” – that’s ALL you ask for when asking people to sign up for a newsletter.
8. Business cards are a placeholder for a relationship extension – not to add them to your free newsletter.
9. The Referral Engine by John Jantsch
10. YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world – add keywords to your videos.
11. Social media is about being there BEFORE the sale – build relationships.
12. C.R.A.P. – Connections (connect about them, not you); Referrals (The Referral Engine by John Jantsch); Awareness/Attention (pay attention to them); Presence (being where the buyer is)

A Twitter user just followed me. They’re following 1,258 people but they have NEVER tweeted. They’ve never engaged with anybody. That’s crazy!

Social media is about interaction, engagement, answering people’s/customer’s questions and concerns.

1. I Tweeted that I was considering using Mohawk paper for my next business cards.
2. Mohawk then replied to my Tweet and asked which paper I was interested in.

Social media is simply a “mind-reading” platform, which allows Mohawk to scan Twitter (using http://search.twitter.com/) for mentions of their name – and then engage with me one-on-one. Mohawk noticed that I was using their name and they responded – simple!

It’s this listening and one-on-one followup interaction that is changing the way businesses communicate with their customers.

As a democratic revolution led by tech-empowered young people sweeps the Arab world, Wadah Khanfar, the head of Al Jazeera, shares a profoundly optimistic view of what’s happening in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and beyond — at this powerful moment when people realized they could step out of their houses and ask for change.

By Jon Swartz, USA TODAY

A surge in social-media use by small businesses reflects a shift in how they operate and their comfort with increasingly easy-to-use technology.

In growing numbers, small-business owners are adopting social-networking services, location-based services, Twitter and online video to promote products and services, according to a new study by MerchantCircle, a social network for small businesses. It polled a fraction of its more than 1.3 million members.

The survey results are the strongest evidence yet that small businesses — which account for more than 90% of all U.S. companies and fuel the economy — are accelerating their use of social media at the expense of traditional media such as newspapers, the Yellow Pages and radio. Even e-mail messages have taken a beating.

Read full article: More small businesses use Twitter, Facebook to promote – USATODAY.com.