Twitter is becoming more popular everyday. If you are a new twitter fan then do not make these common mistakes.
1. Not setting up your Twitter page properly:
Make sure you have a decent photo that people can connect with. This is one of the first things I look for before engaging with a new person. Like you, my time is valuable and I scan photo’s because it’s easy and fast, if someone doesn’t have a decent photo I move on to the next one.
Use your name instead of your @twitter username in the name section. I like to use a persons name when sending out tweets. Having a name is a great way for people to connect with you on a first name bases.
When filing out your bio use quality words, these words are searchable through many of the 3rd party tools that integrate with Twitter. Focus more on key words then sentence structure will give others a greater chance of finding you.
2. Not following up:
Follow up with the people that tweet you and send them a tweet back. This only takes a few minutes a day and by doing this will help you build a strong following.
When someone retweets your tweet send them a thank you or compliment. Retweeting others that retweet you will help you spread quickly into other people’s followers.Check your @replies and DM’s at least once per day.
3. Trying to get a large number of followers:
When I first started using Twitter all I heard about was you need to get followers. This is true, however; I quickly discovered that the quality of followers was much more important then having huge numbers of followers.
With all the 3rd party tools out there that help you auto follow people, it’s hard to focus on the quality of followers you are following. Make sure you focus on keywords that will locate the type of people you want when using these types of programs or tools.
Using keywords and the hashtag is a great way to locate people in your niche. Use alerts and key word tracking to locate people and save time.
4. Self promoting:
I see many people sending out tweets with links that are trying to sell something. Remember, people hate to be sold but love to buy. Sometimes I see tweets with just a link with no description to what the link is, talk about a waste of time.
If you are going to send out links in your tweets you should send them out in moderation. Send out other tweets in between the tweets with links. Providing value in your tweets is the key to getting people to trust you. Don’t send out to many tweets per hour. When someone fills up my twitter page with tweets going out every 3-5 minutes it doesn’t take me long to un-follow them. Using your DM is a great way to keep the twitter stream from getting over crowded.
These are just a few of the Twitter mistakes I have either made myself or have seen others make on Twitter. Just use a little common sense and you will do just fine. Ask yourself, am I tweeting to others like I would like to be tweeted to?
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Read this story and then I will tell you the truth
The Wal-Mart You Don't Know
By: Charles FishmanWed Dec 19, 2007
The giant retailer's low prices often come with a high cost. Wal-Mart's relentless pressure can crush the companies it does business with and force them to send jobs overseas. Are we shopping our way straight to the unemployment line?
A gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is something to behold. The jar is the size of a small aquarium. The fat green pickles, floating in swampy juice, look reptilian, their shapes exaggerated by the glass. It weighs 12 pounds, too big to carry with one hand. The gallon jar of pickles is a display of abundance and excess; it is entrancing, and also vaguely unsettling. This is the product that Wal-Mart fell in love with: Vlasic's gallon jar of pickles.
Wal-Mart priced it at $2.97--a year's supply of pickles for less than $3! "They were using it as a 'statement' item," says Pat Hunn, who calls himself the "mad scientist" of Vlasic's gallon jar. "Wal-Mart was putting it before consumers, saying, This represents what Wal-Mart's about. You can buy a stinkin' gallon of pickles for $2.97. And it's the nation's number-one brand."
Therein lies the basic conundrum of doing business with the world's largest retailer. By selling a gallon of kosher dills for less than most grocers sell a quart, Wal-Mart may have provided a ser-vice for its customers. But what did it do for Vlasic? The pickle maker had spent decades convincing customers that they should pay a premium for its brand. Now Wal-Mart was practically giving them away. And the fevered buying spree that resulted distorted every aspect of Vlasic's operations, from farm field to factory to financial statement.
Indeed, as Vlasic discovered, the real story of Wal-Mart, the story that never gets told, is the story of the pressure the biggest retailer relentlessly applies to its suppliers in the name of bringing us "every day low prices." It's the story of what that pressure does to the companies Wal-Mart does business with, to U.S. manufacturing, and to the economy as a whole. That story can be found floating in a gallon jar of pickles at Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart is not just the world's largest retailer. It's the world's largest company--bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. And in its own category of general merchandise and groceries, Wal-Mart no longer has any real rivals. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined. "Clearly," says Edward Fox, head of Southern Methodist University's J.C. Penney Center for Retailing Excellence, "Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer has ever been." It is, in fact, so big and so furtively powerful as to have become an entirely different order of corporate being.
Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don't change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.
Of course, U.S. companies have been moving jobs offshore for decades, long before Wal-Mart was a retailing power. But there is no question that the chain is helping accelerate the loss of American jobs to low-wage countries such as China. Wal-Mart, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s trumpeted its claim to "Buy American," has doubled its imports from China in the past five years alone, buying some $12 billion in merchandise in 2002. That's nearly 10% of all Chinese exports to the United States.
One way to think of Wal-Mart is as a vast pipeline that gives non-U.S. companies direct access to the American market. "One of the things that limits or slows the growth of imports is the cost of establishing connections and networks," says Paul Krugman, the Princeton University economist. "Wal-Mart is so big and so centralized that it can all at once hook Chinese and other suppliers into its digital system. So--wham!--you have a large switch to overseas sourcing in a period quicker than under the old rules of retailing."
Steve Dobbins has been bearing the brunt of that switch. He's president and CEO of Carolina Mills, a 75-year-old North Carolina company that supplies thread, yarn, and textile finishing to apparel makers--half of which supply Wal-Mart. Carolina Mills grew steadily until 2000. But in the past three years, as its customers have gone either overseas or out of business, it has shrunk from 17 factories to 7, and from 2,600 employees to 1,200. Dobbins's customers have begun to face imported clothing sold so cheaply to Wal-Mart that they could not compete even if they paid their workers nothing.
"People ask, 'How can it be bad for things to come into the U.S. cheaply? How can it be bad to have a bargain at Wal-Mart?' Sure, it's held inflation down, and it's great to have bargains," says Dobbins. "But you can't buy anything if you're not employed. We are shopping ourselves out of jobs."
Ok, now the truth about WalMart............................
What the pickle story did not tell you is the top management at Vlastic Pickles was first greedy and second stupid. They were greedy because all they were thinking about was the multiple truck loads of pickles Walmart was going to buy and how much their bonus would increase from the relationship. Greed is a good thing in that it motivates people to increase business because of the rewards. Walmart buyers are masters at working the “psychology” of greed on vendors. That is their job and they do it very well.
Stupid because they should have known their business well enough to understand how selling Walmart a year’s crop of pickles would affect their profitability. Even I know the more a pickle is processed (cut, sliced, diced, etc) the more value you add thus the more you can sell it for. Vlastic is the pickle packer leader. Why did they not know this fact? Truth is they did but Vlastic management was looking for a short term gain and not looking at the long term results (very much the case for companies in the US). Again they were stupid and WalMart buyers are masters at taking advantage of stupid executives.
This is my point; you call on Walmart you are in control of what happens. You can say “no” in any meeting. You just have to be smart enough to know when to say it.
The #1 objective at Walmart today is to increase profits so their stock price will increase. Walmart’s current dilemma is sales growth has slowed and new store expansion will come in higher cost areas (bad for profits).
What is their plan? If I were President of Walmart I would be tapping into the major suppliers marketing/slotting funds which they use to buy shelf space with every retailer except Walmart. This money can go right to the bottom line for Walmart increasing their profits without additional capital investment.
How? Easy, just appeal to suppliers top managements greed by making a realistic projection of how much they can increase their sales and market share because there will be less product assortment in their category (read my blog about win/play/show).
Walmart controls over thirty percent of the grocery sales now. If a major vendor doubles sales at Walmart then their overall category share increases dramatically, which may result in savings thru less promotional spending with other customers. What is the down side for major suppliers? Stay tuned for my next blog post to see.
By: Charles FishmanWed Dec 19, 2007
The giant retailer's low prices often come with a high cost. Wal-Mart's relentless pressure can crush the companies it does business with and force them to send jobs overseas. Are we shopping our way straight to the unemployment line?
A gallon-sized jar of whole pickles is something to behold. The jar is the size of a small aquarium. The fat green pickles, floating in swampy juice, look reptilian, their shapes exaggerated by the glass. It weighs 12 pounds, too big to carry with one hand. The gallon jar of pickles is a display of abundance and excess; it is entrancing, and also vaguely unsettling. This is the product that Wal-Mart fell in love with: Vlasic's gallon jar of pickles.
Wal-Mart priced it at $2.97--a year's supply of pickles for less than $3! "They were using it as a 'statement' item," says Pat Hunn, who calls himself the "mad scientist" of Vlasic's gallon jar. "Wal-Mart was putting it before consumers, saying, This represents what Wal-Mart's about. You can buy a stinkin' gallon of pickles for $2.97. And it's the nation's number-one brand."
Therein lies the basic conundrum of doing business with the world's largest retailer. By selling a gallon of kosher dills for less than most grocers sell a quart, Wal-Mart may have provided a ser-vice for its customers. But what did it do for Vlasic? The pickle maker had spent decades convincing customers that they should pay a premium for its brand. Now Wal-Mart was practically giving them away. And the fevered buying spree that resulted distorted every aspect of Vlasic's operations, from farm field to factory to financial statement.
Indeed, as Vlasic discovered, the real story of Wal-Mart, the story that never gets told, is the story of the pressure the biggest retailer relentlessly applies to its suppliers in the name of bringing us "every day low prices." It's the story of what that pressure does to the companies Wal-Mart does business with, to U.S. manufacturing, and to the economy as a whole. That story can be found floating in a gallon jar of pickles at Wal-Mart.
Wal-Mart is not just the world's largest retailer. It's the world's largest company--bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. And in its own category of general merchandise and groceries, Wal-Mart no longer has any real rivals. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined. "Clearly," says Edward Fox, head of Southern Methodist University's J.C. Penney Center for Retailing Excellence, "Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer has ever been." It is, in fact, so big and so furtively powerful as to have become an entirely different order of corporate being.
Wal-Mart wields its power for just one purpose: to bring the lowest possible prices to its customers. At Wal-Mart, that goal is never reached. The retailer has a clear policy for suppliers: On basic products that don't change, the price Wal-Mart will pay, and will charge shoppers, must drop year after year. But what almost no one outside the world of Wal-Mart and its 21,000 suppliers knows is the high cost of those low prices. Wal-Mart has the power to squeeze profit-killing concessions from vendors. To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.
Of course, U.S. companies have been moving jobs offshore for decades, long before Wal-Mart was a retailing power. But there is no question that the chain is helping accelerate the loss of American jobs to low-wage countries such as China. Wal-Mart, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s trumpeted its claim to "Buy American," has doubled its imports from China in the past five years alone, buying some $12 billion in merchandise in 2002. That's nearly 10% of all Chinese exports to the United States.
One way to think of Wal-Mart is as a vast pipeline that gives non-U.S. companies direct access to the American market. "One of the things that limits or slows the growth of imports is the cost of establishing connections and networks," says Paul Krugman, the Princeton University economist. "Wal-Mart is so big and so centralized that it can all at once hook Chinese and other suppliers into its digital system. So--wham!--you have a large switch to overseas sourcing in a period quicker than under the old rules of retailing."
Steve Dobbins has been bearing the brunt of that switch. He's president and CEO of Carolina Mills, a 75-year-old North Carolina company that supplies thread, yarn, and textile finishing to apparel makers--half of which supply Wal-Mart. Carolina Mills grew steadily until 2000. But in the past three years, as its customers have gone either overseas or out of business, it has shrunk from 17 factories to 7, and from 2,600 employees to 1,200. Dobbins's customers have begun to face imported clothing sold so cheaply to Wal-Mart that they could not compete even if they paid their workers nothing.
"People ask, 'How can it be bad for things to come into the U.S. cheaply? How can it be bad to have a bargain at Wal-Mart?' Sure, it's held inflation down, and it's great to have bargains," says Dobbins. "But you can't buy anything if you're not employed. We are shopping ourselves out of jobs."
Ok, now the truth about WalMart............................
What the pickle story did not tell you is the top management at Vlastic Pickles was first greedy and second stupid. They were greedy because all they were thinking about was the multiple truck loads of pickles Walmart was going to buy and how much their bonus would increase from the relationship. Greed is a good thing in that it motivates people to increase business because of the rewards. Walmart buyers are masters at working the “psychology” of greed on vendors. That is their job and they do it very well.
Stupid because they should have known their business well enough to understand how selling Walmart a year’s crop of pickles would affect their profitability. Even I know the more a pickle is processed (cut, sliced, diced, etc) the more value you add thus the more you can sell it for. Vlastic is the pickle packer leader. Why did they not know this fact? Truth is they did but Vlastic management was looking for a short term gain and not looking at the long term results (very much the case for companies in the US). Again they were stupid and WalMart buyers are masters at taking advantage of stupid executives.
This is my point; you call on Walmart you are in control of what happens. You can say “no” in any meeting. You just have to be smart enough to know when to say it.
The #1 objective at Walmart today is to increase profits so their stock price will increase. Walmart’s current dilemma is sales growth has slowed and new store expansion will come in higher cost areas (bad for profits).
What is their plan? If I were President of Walmart I would be tapping into the major suppliers marketing/slotting funds which they use to buy shelf space with every retailer except Walmart. This money can go right to the bottom line for Walmart increasing their profits without additional capital investment.
How? Easy, just appeal to suppliers top managements greed by making a realistic projection of how much they can increase their sales and market share because there will be less product assortment in their category (read my blog about win/play/show).
Walmart controls over thirty percent of the grocery sales now. If a major vendor doubles sales at Walmart then their overall category share increases dramatically, which may result in savings thru less promotional spending with other customers. What is the down side for major suppliers? Stay tuned for my next blog post to see.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Walmart shoppers noticing a difference on the grocery shelves
Consumers aren’t finding the variety of products they used to on Walmart shelves, as the retailer offers fewer flavors, sizes and forms of many grocery products.
Columbus, Ohio-based Retail Forward in its October WalMart World reports some indication of consumers shopping less at Walmart because they can’t find what they want. About 24 percent of shoppers reported going to Walmart less this year compared with a year ago, while 14 percent of shoppers reported going to Walmart more often, according to the WalMart World report by Jennifer Halterman, Retail Forward senior consultant. Those numbers are from Retail Forward’s Shopper-Scape surveys from December 2007 to August 2009. The Shopper Scrape survey asks 4,000 people each month about their shopping habits.
“WalMart’s SKU (stock keeping unit) rationalization and reduction efforts as part of Win, Play, Show may actually be a point of contention with shoppers; some report reduced inventory as a reason for shopping Walmart Supercenter less often,” the Wal-Mart World report stated. Shoppers filled in explanations for some reasons they go to Walmart less, including “too crowded, reduced inventory, no longer carries items I previously purchased” and “they’ve cut out a lot of items they used to carry,” according to Retail Forward’s WalMart World.
WalMart’s win, play, show strategy means it wants to be well-stocked in major brands and categories that sell well; and will play in other brands that shoppers want, but won’t offer as great a selection. WalMart will devote even less shelf space to the “show” products, items it carries because some shoppers buy those items but they aren’t the biggest sellers or perhaps aren’t national or dominate brands.
Consumers get cranky if they’re used to buying a certain item which gets discontinued. Sometimes, they will try another brand in its place, but if it’s important enough some will shop elsewhere to get what they want.
Time will tell if Win-Play-Show increases WalMart sales and profits.
Columbus, Ohio-based Retail Forward in its October WalMart World reports some indication of consumers shopping less at Walmart because they can’t find what they want. About 24 percent of shoppers reported going to Walmart less this year compared with a year ago, while 14 percent of shoppers reported going to Walmart more often, according to the WalMart World report by Jennifer Halterman, Retail Forward senior consultant. Those numbers are from Retail Forward’s Shopper-Scape surveys from December 2007 to August 2009. The Shopper Scrape survey asks 4,000 people each month about their shopping habits.
“WalMart’s SKU (stock keeping unit) rationalization and reduction efforts as part of Win, Play, Show may actually be a point of contention with shoppers; some report reduced inventory as a reason for shopping Walmart Supercenter less often,” the Wal-Mart World report stated. Shoppers filled in explanations for some reasons they go to Walmart less, including “too crowded, reduced inventory, no longer carries items I previously purchased” and “they’ve cut out a lot of items they used to carry,” according to Retail Forward’s WalMart World.
WalMart’s win, play, show strategy means it wants to be well-stocked in major brands and categories that sell well; and will play in other brands that shoppers want, but won’t offer as great a selection. WalMart will devote even less shelf space to the “show” products, items it carries because some shoppers buy those items but they aren’t the biggest sellers or perhaps aren’t national or dominate brands.
Consumers get cranky if they’re used to buying a certain item which gets discontinued. Sometimes, they will try another brand in its place, but if it’s important enough some will shop elsewhere to get what they want.
Time will tell if Win-Play-Show increases WalMart sales and profits.
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