Just listened to a a very thought provoking Marketing Over Coffee Podcast Episode (Who is Number Six?). Lots of good discussion and information as usual and I won’t repeat the tips they gave here, go listen to the podcast (hint there are some great ones about getting people to your blog quickly and researching your competitors).

But I do want to give my two cents on their response to a question a listener had about Twitter. The listener noticed that a competitor was following their company Twitter account and the Twitter accounts of their employees.

The first advice was to block that Twitter user, but it was pointed out that’s not very effective as the person can just create a new account. And do you really want to spend your time putting your thumb into each leak in the dam?

Then they suggested that you just lie in your Tweets. Put out some disinformation. I don’t agree with that advice. You’re going to lie to all of your followers to give this one person bad information? What if you have a legitimate customer who would like to meet you and heard through Twitter that you were going to be in town, but that wasn’t true. How are you going to explain that to that customer?

This leads me to two observations, one about marketing in general (and maybe social media in particular), another about Twitter.

You need a good product.

If a competitor can “steal’ your sales simply by showing up in the same place you plan on going (the example given in the podcast), then you need to improve either your product or your pitch (if your product is already great). And by product, I don’t necessarily mean the physical thing you sell. Maybe you sell brushes, like every other brush salesman, what can you do to make the buying experience with you 100 times better than with others? What kind of service can you provide that your competitors don’t?

The social media experts that I follow keep coming back to this tenet: you need a good product. That’s what you have to start with. Then the internet and social media can put you out there, competing with the big boys.

Twitter is a Public Place.

Read that again. Anyone can read your twitter stream if you have a public twitter account. And most business accounts are public. Maybe it’s time to take a look at public vs. private accounts, though. I have three different Twitter accounts, one for me personally, one for my freelance coding business, one for Brandtailers.

All of them are public right now. I could take my personal account private, though, then I would know that only my folowers could see my updates. Might be a good idea, though I tend to tweet very innocuous stuff.

I could also see having a private business account that was just to keep on industry news, not really for tweeting any content. I may do that with my own business account, see how it works.

But, once again, most people have public accounts and those are available to anyone to read and search. So, don’t say anything in there that you don’t want the whole wide world to read and repeat. Kind of like email (that is how you think about email, isn’t it? I know a lot of high profile people don’t, but I wish they bet they did now).

My advice for dealing with a stalking competitor: be cautious about what you say, but hopefully most of your followers are colleagues or clients, concentrate on tweets that help them.