‘Follow us’ and ‘Stay Connected’ buttons are now as commonplace on websites as the word ‘like’ is ever-present in a teenager’s vocabulary.

I’m seeing it in the most unlikely of businesses this year. This photo was taken at a country park. Do you really want to follow and interact with the tweets of a park (it certainly isn’t Disney)? How about the Trainline? Or Firefox?

Yes, Facebook is hooked into 8% of the world’s population (26 million in the UK) but when such buttons become ubiquitous clichés, what will you do to stand out?

Twitter is on a meteoric rise. In 2007 folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day; 300,000 times a day in 2008; 2.5 million per day in 2009 and now it’s 50 million tweets per day. This month the whole shebang crossed the 10 billion tweet milestone.

Which of your eyes would sell for a growth chart like this?

But dissenters say that folks don’t stay involved. That 60% of people who sign up, get bored within weeks and don’t return. That the noise from the few is deafening and that the many just listen and regurgitate. They’d say (ironically, probably via a blog) that it’s all a narcissistic fad.

Businesses are looking at Dell as the poster child of Twitter use and think they can all show offers in 140 characters that convert highly. But the fact is transactional sites get less than 10% of Twitter’s exit links, the majority goes to other content driven sites (social media). Others take a more puritan stance and think it’s the conversation – engagement – that wins in the end.

Personally, I’m likening the whole thing to cricket. Is there a more polarising game in existence?

Chances are if you like cricket, you’ll love cricket. You’ll want to skive off work and sit for hours watching what many would call ‘nothing much.’ You might even want to drop your fabulous music career for cricket commentary (Lily Allen does). The non-believers would laugh at you and say the whole thing is a waste of good grass.

Understanding and liking Twitter is every bit as binary. You either do, or you don’t.

But the one marketing area that unquestionably lends itself well to Twitter is sport. Take Lance Armstrong. Lance is the Stephen Fry of tweeting sports personalities and his build-up and insight to the Tour de France will be fascinating.

F1 newbie, Lotus are also on the guerrilla marketing bandwagon, allowing chief technical officer, Mike Gascoyne and others to give us real time access to their thoughts. During the Bahrain GP he actually told us that Jarno Trulli was pitting on the next lap. In the ultra-competitive and secretive world of F1 racing that level of engagement with outsiders (fans and rivals, obviously) is astounding. I’d argue that it’s to the benefit of the Lotus brand – to its share of mindset, to its growth, to its media coverage (as others write about it) and to its value as we get closer to the heart of Lotus as an organisation and build a relationship.

What about you and your organisation? Will you be donning your digital cricket whites this summer or would that be a time-wasting bore?

Smith-Harmon has released a study of American retail email trends for last year. Unsurprisingly, 2009 saw record volumes distributed.

It states that the 100 largest retailers sent an average of 132 promotional emails to each of their subscribers. That’s an average of 11 emails a month and 2.5 per week, per subscriber (peaking at 15.4 in December). Overall, top online retailers sent 12% more promotional emails in 2009 than they did the year before—and 39% more than during 2007.

You’ve got to wonder if we’re going to kill the golden goose here. The overwhelming number of emails threatens to neuter your subscribers’ inbox. I’d argue consumers are becoming numb to special offers and super savings.

This is about perfecting frequency, not necessarily content. It’s a nexus that lies between maximum engagement (revenue in most cases) and maximum disengagement (unsubscribers). Think about consumers’ distain for physical junk mail promotional mail shots. It’s not too much of a leap to imagine that feeling about your inbox -  even if you did volunteer your address.

It’s pretty much a given that SMEs are more likely to be passionate about what they do than lumbering corporates answering to the City. Let’s be honest, most SMEs don’t tend to start a gardening business if they can’t stand the sight of grass.

Unfortunately, that passion can overrun into myopia where those in business only play to themselves – the People Like Us syndrome.

I’m sure you hear it in your office all the time: I’d never buy it for my home (so I assume my customers wouldn’t either)… my wife wouldn’t like it (so let’s leave it out of the catalogue)…. I’m not sure we’ve the market for that here (because they wouldn’t pay for it themselves).

It’s said that ‘me’ and ‘I’ are some of the worst words to use in a sales pitch because the customer doesn’t care about you or your likes and dislikes relating to that car, that printer or that fridge freezer. They’re not buying for a complete stranger (i.e. the salesperson); they’re buying for themselves to satisfy selfish reasons.

People Like Us is the other side of the same coin to be avoided in business.

I used to work for someone who claimed proudly that he knew almost nothing about our product and he certainly wouldn’t use our products. He would even speak derogatorily of those who did. With pride he’d say, “I’m a businessman, I don’t need to know about a product to sell it.”

Of course there’s quite a parcel of truth in his arrogance: your estate agent didn’t live in your house before you bought it and Dr John Davis doesn’t really know what childbirth is like. But we all want our salespeople to be empathetic, don’t we? We demand advice and expertise and the only real way of gaining that is through experience.

Just how our teams communicate that to customers is as much a marketing issue as website copy or advertising budgets. And it might be worth reminding them that ‘do what I say, not what I do’ is even more unpalatable now than it was as a child. Would you take health advice from an obese, alcoholic, chain-smoker?

Yet another naval-gazing award ceremony took place last week where BSkyB were claimed Britain’s Most Admired Company from Management Today.

Clearly, MT’s judges didn’t base the trophy on Sky’s email campaigns. If they had, MT wouldn’t discover personal, relevant and timed messages – their emails are more like blanket mini-billboards.

Every week or so Sky point me to sport I don’t watch and movies I have no interest in. Considering they have the digital knowledge of everything my household has watched for a couple of years, they display zero wherewithal in their emails.

A few ideas for Sky’s marketing team to increase email PR (personal and relevancy):
Croudsourcing – people who liked X and Y (stuff my house has seen) also watch Z on Wednesday at 10pm
Follow on – if you liked The Apprentice you’ll love our top three business programs (some you may need to pay for)
Bundles – we’ve prepared three bundles of viewing which we think you’ll like. Please pick and amend them. These can be uploaded to my box and amending them lets Sky’s brain know and next week’s bundles will be even more relevant.
DVD iLike – Sky should ask me about my DVD collection to better profile my tastes. You could even take into account my book collection as well (I always think Amazon miss a trick here by only tracking purchases).

I am infinitely more likely to engage with, and probably upgrade, because of the relevancy of the above. So why do they torture my inbox with High School Musical and the Ashes?

Thorough email PR like this is way beyond the data mining systems at SMEs but surely Britain’s Most Admired could up the ante?

I was asked this week, ‘What does a manager really do?’ It was a fairly innocuous, rhetorical, jovial question from a well-paid, senior person.

The graduate switch flicked and I immediately thought, ‘seeing that the company’s goals are met’. After all, it’s the leader’s job to define and create those goals and aims, and it’s management’s job to realise them. Right?

But managing people is rarely a squeaky clean affair. I’m not a huge supporter of lofty job titles as they can often cause internal problems, but anyone claiming to be a ‘Manager’ will find themselves wearing several hats (in no particular order):

• go between
• consultant (to those above and below)
• amateur psychologist
• negotiator
• dispute resolver
• idea instigator
• organiser
• governor
• role model
• decision maker (the buck stops and all that)
• communications expert (surely THE key to management)
• soldier (ever metaphorically fallen on your sword?)
• captain
• big brother/sister (you need to eat more, drink less, curb spending)
• counsellor
• teacher
• steward
• servant
• policy pursuer
• change agent
• supporter (of others, of the different viewpoint – perhaps the weaker voice)
• challenger (of the status quo)

It strikes me that a manager who only wants to manage isn’t anywhere near up to the job. The seven-letter title is low-balling the variety of commitment needed in all but the safest of environments.

Most business leaders don’t need a poll or a study to arrive at the conclusion that managers are the largest reason for staff resignations, but the news this week sends us straight there.

Of course direct departure isn’t the only symptom of poor management. Professor Mike Kelly, director of public health, NICE said to the BBC that more than 13 million working days a year are lost because of work related stress, anxiety and depression.

How much of that is directly attributable to managers and bosses is pretty impossible to pin down, but haven’t we got to admit there’s likely to be an element of cause and effect there?

Photo: one of the UK’s most feared managers, Sir Alex Ferguson (image from Wikipedia)

Most people think the saying ‘first impressions count’ is all about clothes or hair. They’re wrong (to a degree). It’s more about attitude than anything else.

How you carry yourself when you enter the room; how you interact in the opening few seconds; your handshake; your eye contact; your confidence.

It’s the X Factor test. Contestants stroll out on stage and before they sing a note the judges have formed an opinion. I’m guessing that original sniff test of an opinion is correct in the vast majority of cases (Susan Boyle is the notable exception).

I had the horrific experience of calling an ambulance for a heart attack victim recently. Of course, just having the medics arrive released some of the pressure in the room (help had come!) but their attitude was exemplary. They were: calm, authoritative, professional, clear communicators, even humorous with an obvious chain of command.

It’s largely natural, but like most things, we can teach ourselves to improve our attitude. These medics clearly had.

Plenty has been said about Dixons’ comparison ads lately. They’re a blatant come-on aimed squarely at John Lewis, Harrods and Selfridges. They invite consumers to research with their competitors and then convert to Dixons for stronger pricing.

This is primarily a drive for Dixons’ website, with their retail sites only operating at airports. The strapline is, Dixons.co.uk: the last place you want to go.

These are more ‘designed’ than the comparison ads seen from the supermarkets. By using rivals’ fonts and colour pallet, they’re well and truly ‘up yours’ ads.

Having seen them for a while, I still can’t fully decide if they’re touting an honest and clever reflection of modern shopping habits or even pushing a wee bit of a class divide.

Either way, I think they’re a bellwether of what to expect from copywriters this winter, where ads will be thin on superlatives and hard on competitors. The Christmas run-up is getting all in your face – don’t skirt around with clever copy, get down to brass tacks and call your competitor out. Just look at Tesco and Asda for more evidence.