| Can Twitter Help Your Local Los Angeles Business? |
| Monday, September 14 2009 |
  If you have a local business or just want to build your local network for personal reasons, on-line social media is a tremendous tool. Do you know how to focus on Los Angeles within the far-reaching internet world? Your first stop should be on-line communities built specifically to serve the local community. For instance if you want to reach successful, active unmarried people living in Los Angeles - you can go straight to SingularCity or their fans on Facebook. If you are looking for influence, finding influential tweeters in your city is a good place to start. For me, anyone worth following on Twitter lists their name on their profile. Once you have identified a full name, you can also reach out to their other on-line points like Facebook. Recently, Mashable published a good list of services that support local search. None of them are perfect - but after checking each one out, I found I liked Twitter Grader best because it measures well beyond number of followers. Twitter Grader’s Dharmesh Shah responded to Mayank Gupta’s request to clarify their grading system. “We look at things like the number of followers, the power of those followers, the number of friends, volume of tweets, degree of engagement with other users.”  It is worth checking national listings on Twitter Grader because some people that you see at local events all the time don’t show up on city lists because they don’t include the word “Los Angeles” in their bio or location. Key word searches can be used to hone in on your particular interests. Twitterholic is also useful. They rank only by followers, but they do show number of updates to help you with your own evaluation and you can get a list of 1,000 Twitterati for Los Angeles. Twitter directory WeFollow has potential to be used for geographic selection combined with interests. They have added location as an automatic category. Click on “info” and you can manually check the self-selected categories. But other than number of followers, no other levels of activities are listed.  No twitter analytic tool or directory supersedes your judgment. If you are doing this right, you are actually looking at the Twitter stream itself before following. The best network is not just on-line. Opportunities to balance a tech/entertainment network with face-to-face relationship building right here in Los Angeles has been improving in both quality and quantity over the past year. Here’s a list of upcoming events that I hope will be useful for you. It’s tech/entertainment centric but I included the 27th Annual American Wine and Food Festival October 2 - October 4 because that is simply an event you shouldn’t ignore. Also please note that 140 | The Twitter Conference coming to Los Angeles at the Skirball Cultural Center September 22-23, has an extremely impressive speaker list, including Tony Robbins.  LA Twestival, Level 3 at Hollywood & Highland, September 13 LA Tweetah Tweetup .02, Maison 140, Beverly Hills, September 14 Tech Supper Club, BlankSpaces, September 15 WITI, September 15 Digital LA Characters Go Digital , WGA, September 16 DealMaker Media LA, Rustic Canyon Partners, West LA, September 17 MindShare LA, Downtown, September 17 Media Leaders, Ritz Carlton Marina Del Rey, Sept 19 “5 Screening and Cocktails, Bungalow Club, September 21 140 | The Twitter Conference LA #140tc, Skirball, September 22 - September 23 Social Media Club LA, BlankSpaces, September 22 LAVA VC Speed Dating, ICON Aircraft, September 23 New Media Vault, Downtown, September 24 Girls in Tech LA, Fox Santa Monica, September 28 Docstoc Startups Uncensored, Santa Monica Public Library, September 29 Digital LA - Movie Marketing Panel, Fox Lot, Zanuck Theater, September 29 CloudCamp LA, Downtown, September 30 DigitalLA Digital Drinks, Roosevelt Hotel, September 30 ThinkLA, October 1 27th Annual American Wine and Food Festival, October 2 - October 4 Hollywood 2.0, October 9 Digital Hollywood Lowe’s Santa Monica Hotel, October 19 - 22 |
I’d love to meet folks in LA at our Tweetup here. A few of our key execs are in LA, too. Please pass the word!
MarketingProfs LA Tweetup at the Bodega
http://mprofsla.eventbrite.com/
thank you, Clara"