Chris Brogan wrote an article on “50 Ways To Use Twitter For Business“, But it got me thinking, what are best uses of Twitter for adult business and who should adult business tweeters connect with?

Twitter Basics

• Open a twitter account and use Twitter Search to see what people are saying about your name, your competitor’s names and key words that relate to your industry.
• Make sure you have a photo - no one wants to follow a faceless person, it shows LAZINESS.
• Dialog and interact, don’t just spam the crap out of your followers and with blog postings. Engage in meaningful discussions and funny comments.
• Talk about things in your industry. No, I don’t care what dildo was up Tera’s ass, talk about trends and new media outlets, etc. Also comment on industries that might be complimentary to what you are doing.
• No pushing and shoving. Again, don’t blast your content, photos and videos all the time. You will lose followers.
• Be Human and talk about YOU. People like knowing about people.

What to Tweet About

• Write about what you are currently involved in, reading or find engaging. Again, people like humanity and personality.
• If you own and adult related site, have your talent tweeting. Get them blackberries and iphones, let them tweet about their lives and things going on with them. Leverage your employees to drive traffic to your site. Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections.
• Ask questions about direction, marketing or content. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
• Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who she follows, and follow her.

Tweeting Etiquette

• You don’t have to reply to every @ tweet directed to you (try to reply to some, but don’t feel guilty).
• Use direct messages for 1-to-1 conversations if you feel there’s no value to Twitter at large to hear the conversation. No one cares about your dog and cat.
• Use Tweetdeck and Twhirl to manage Twitter.
• Shorten URLS with TinyURL .
• If someone doesn’t like what you say, they can unfollow you. Let them go, they are replaced by three who love you.
• Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.

Twitter Pros & Cons

• Twitter takes up time. - Please! You can engage in twitter as much, or not as much, as you like.
• Twitter takes you away from other productive work. I have made some of my best business deals because of Twitter - making money and growing is productive!
• There are other ways to do this. Yes, but PLURK sucks!
• Twitter doesn’t apply to the adult industry. Twitter’s only a few million people (only). And you know what, they buy sex toys, see videos, are interested in mainstream marketing, etc.
• Twitter doesn’t replace direct email marketing. Ummm - Twitter is real time. If you send out one adult related link to a file or video, it will be downloaded 20,000 times in ONE DAY. Put that out to millions who may have not seen it and ummm - get where I am going? But make sure it’s somewhat tasteful.
• Twitter opens you up to more criticism and griping. If you hear what is wrong, you can avoid making those mistakes! Or you can discover how wrong they are and realize what you are doing is right. If you are using Twitter to only promote prostitution and trying to drive sales to your pay site, you are going to fail. Twitter should be used to ENLIGHTEN, SHARE & ENGAGE. Not just with mainstream audiences, but with other adult personalities. The adult industry can be lonely & isolating place.
• Twitter breaks news faster than other sources, often (especially if the news impacts online denizens).- Damn skippy. It’s a viral as viral can get.
• Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you look for it, and/or if you follow the right folks). My twitter is a mix of adult, mainstream adult and mainstream marketers, mixed in with people I just like. I get all kinds of info and ideas from comparing opinions and trends. Twitter is instant market research.
• Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (mine are). I have monetized Twitter for my writing and marketing services. I’ve also used it to connect with other adult business ventures. It’s been successful. But again, it’s for the right reasons, not simply to make a quick buck or as a tool in black hat SEO techniques.

Sites I Have Found On Twitter I Love

1. http://www.beautifulrebecca.com/
2. http://www.melissagira.com
3. http://wakingvixen.com
4. http://dolorem.com
5. http://omgomgomfg.com

Victorian Goth. Dark Couture. KinkGlam - whatever you want to call it, featuring Bondage & Fetish in mainstream fashion trends has moved beyond Vivien Westwood & Alexander McQueen.

I noticed this trend at the start of 2008; Chanel’s footwear and stocking ads in Vogue, W and Bazaar caught my attention. I thought to myself, “This is foot fetish that men pay for,” being brought to the mainstream masses for free in the glossy pages of haute couture magazines. So for 2009, more couture brands and upscale indie fashion designers are bringing Kink mainstream with bondage & fetish-inspired dresses, shoes and accessories.

I am elated to see it. I shows that mainstream society no longer equates BDSM with pornography and is finally recognizing Fetish as an art form that pays homage to alternative creativity and sexuality.

Fashionising.com, a fantastic blog written by Tania Baukamper, discusses the trend more in-depth and how it is translates in to 2009 trendsetters’  (Rihanna & Victoria Beckham) personal styles.

My next hope is that designers such as Chanel, Christian Louboutin, Givechy & Thakoon take it a step further and ditch the traditional runway models and feature of Fetish industry professionals in their advertising campaigns.

My suggestions: Model -  Kumi Monster Photographers - Steven Diet Goedde or Christine Kessler.

Photos: Kumi Monster in Atsuko Kudo & Fashionising.com.

Getting back into writing and getting caught up on what I’ve missed/not read, I jumped over to Melissa Gira’s website. She been busy writing and producing the wonderful things she so amazingly good at discussing. I was actually surprised to find an article of hers on The Frisky. I really like the Frisky, the content is interesting and I love the design and functionality. I’ve viewed it as conservative when it comes to sex - you know, the vanilla/mainstream side. And for the most point it is. But they have the wonderful Gira blogging. For give me Melissa for being so Web 1.0 on this.

It’s funny, I ended my blog posts in October talking about a post that Gira wrote, and I start with one.

Melissa: You made me smile at this, as I read, I had flashes of the ex-boyfriends I’ve had (damn the trail is long) who stalk my twitter and my Facebook for updates - to the point you ban them off Facebook.

Lesson: Twitterstalking and using social media to follow your ex-girlfriends, ex-boyfriends, clients, ex-pornstar you were involved with is not healthy. It’s time to move on. Here is a great article on HOW.

The Frisky: When Blogs Cry - How To Break Up Online

Cancel, unsubscribe, unfollow. Sort out how you want to react to the breakup only after you’ve canceled the relationship, unsubscribed from her Tumblr, or blocked him from Twitter. To undo a relationship that made it online in any form—whether you’ve got photos together all over MySpace or earned your own tag on Gawker—requires investing as much shared exposure as you put in. Make a cold calculation: in my case, that meant reframing a year-and-a-half long affair, across half a dozen online networks, and doing it in just a few days.  This condenses everything: how much it hurts, how fast you have to react.  You had weeks or months to attach to one another’s blogs, profiles, and endearingly staged snapshots.  Now you have to delete or address it all, all at once.

We live in public. Those of us who document even a small part of our lives online hit that moment when we realize our audience isn’t just our friends: they’re more like fans. Any girl whose kept a LiveJournal or posted photos of her shoes to it has felt this. In talking about your breakup, you’re addressing those “friends,” not your ex—and if your ex has an online footprint equal to or greater than yours?  Take charge of your own reputation by telling your story—even if that’s to say you’re going to keep it discreet.

Focus, and cause no collateral damage. The heart’s built-in amnesia – time healing all wounds – is not going to guide your sense of judgment in an online breakup. What will give you resilience later is to tell only your own side now, even if that self-imposed silence aches. The one thing I’d take back from my breakup-blogging is a reference to the sex life of someone close to my ex. But addressing the woman who named me in her own screeds against my ex, after those became the subject of comment for our mutual friends? That not only felt fair, but necessary.  In the case of involving those outside the breakup: only expose what you absolutely need to, and only about those equally desperate for the attention.

A pre-emptive makeup? The strange thing is, it really wasn’t hard to read what strangers—who had no interest in my relationship when it was going well—had to say when I was torching it in their RSS reader. It was easy, and easy to obsess on having the crowd vet “what it all meant.” By the time my ex and I reconciled – and screwed, and cried – the worst things we could’ve said to one another had already been said, in front of an audience. Their reblogged attention was gratifying just long enough for us to figure out how little we needed them to make sense of our relationship ourselves.

In mid-September, the beautiful Melissa Gira, wrote a piece about me in Valley Wag. It was called “Porn Marketer teaches you how to use Twitter”. I laughed at myself. Porn marketer I didn’t know I could get that title.  Thanks Melissa, I love it.

Since then, Melissa’s column was cut and I wanted to vocalize my dismay, it is really a shame. I only read Valley Wag because of Melissa. It drew me in to exploring the rest of the website. My link to her column will remain in my “Fix List”.

Many publications cut their sex columnists - supposedly because of the economic state and needing to tighten budgets, cut the fat.

My initial reaction was “Big Mistake”.

Sex is just as comforting, distracting and fulfilling as the macroni and cheese, good books or  reading the latest “stay positive” article. Mainstream Sex, ALT sex and even Kink Sex are just as relevant as anything else that could be published.

You had brilliant minds working hard to add value to their media outlets (Audacia Ray, Regina Lynn, Tristan Taoromino).

My Questions: Do they feel it was an easy line item to help their bottom line or did they did it to change public perception of brand in the midst of the economic crisis and political changes?

I would interested to see if there are positive effects after excluding the sexual voices that provided knowledge and education to their mainstream audiences; I think Valley Wag, Village Voice and Wired will find many drawbacks to hasty decisions.

I was working on my Tumblr a few weeks and came across this post from Melissa Gira. I chuckled a bit, I have been thinking about public perception <of me> as a writer/blogger/character and I read this:

This is not a compliment.

On that same thread: I’m tangling hard with this notion of public persona. That for whatever reason, writing about sex gives some people the idea that you are available sexually to them (this is not new, this is something I’ve noticed a long time ago). But this being commonly understood as a consumable girl is hitting a breaking point for me. Does it mean I can’t flirt-for-real in public spaces without being perceived as buying into a role, without agreeing with that being pegged as The Sex Girl?

I was never that girl. I never played against my own intelligence to make men comfortable around me. I come on strong by being open, not teasing. I don’t look for strength in men’s eyes that way. As temporarily delightful as cocktail conversation may be — until our cabs come — I get my real and lasting courage from my own vulnerability. I can only trust my sense of worth to be safe with those unafraid to love me, not someone who finds me amusing five minutes at a time.

This is the year of being smart about being seen.

Thank you Melissa. You said what I was looking for.

I don’t know why men (yes, it is men only - never women) think because we write about sex, marketing sex, sex & society et al., that we are available. I was astonished to find how many mainstream, social media/SEO men would contact me via Twitter or Facebook to see if we could have “drinks”. I was excited at first, “Wow - mainstream people take note of my work and wanting to meet!”

Uh, I realized that “coffee” was not their intention, it was can I get a free piece of ass and someone to support me. This progressed into another interesting phenomena: When I would attend webinar  as “Callie” that I would receive emails from employees of the companies that hosted the webinar. Again, I thought it was about the company itself, but it wasn’t. The only thing it was about was their employee’s side adult businesses, or should I say - wanna be businesses. It prompted the series I wrote on being an ethical marketer. I’ve learned some valuable lessons.

So now I can say - No, you will not fuck me and no, I am not gonna teach you to be an adult marketer for free. You will PAY ME - for marketing consulting, not for sex that is.

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks rethinking our business model and direction based Melissa’s comment about being smart about being seen. So you will see me again, just in different directions and areas. Looking forward to engaging conversations again.

Callie

New Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/AdultMarketing

A good friend of mine and I were talking about Fetish and mainstream marketing. He had bought Ed Fox’s latest book from Taschen and fell in love with it. What came out of this minor “erotic awakening” was how fetishism has creeped into the marketing/advertising for clothing, lingerie and footwear. He now saw it everywhere, even when it wasn’t supposed to be there.

I said, “Darling, where do think the love of women’s’ feet began?” The book is beautiful, high-art and worth the purchase. Check it chickies!