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

Guest Post By AV Flox via BlogHER:

“Did you know that 71 percent of guys would rather have great sex occasionally than not-so-hot sex all the time?” Simone asked me, paging through the February issue of Cosmopolitan.

“Let me see that,” I said, reaching out and scanning the cover of the magazine. “I’m writing an article about how to improve our sex lives.”

Simone turned a page, “well, if anyone can write that, it’s you.”

“Actually…” I started, but I trailed off. The truth is that I need a guide more than anyone.

“I have a theory that the longer we’re exposed to a stimulus, the higher the tolerance, and the less able said stimulus is to engender the effect it once did,” I said, lighting a cigarette.

Simone looked at me for a moment, then smiled, “what?”

In preparation for this piece I did a little crowdsourcing on Twitter, asking over the course of several weeks what people thought was an essential component to good sex. The answer, seven times out of ten was: intimacy.

“Really?” I asked myself over and over as the direct messages and e-mails poured in. It just didn’t jive.

“When I think about dynamite sex, I don’t think about intimacy,” I told my friend Sugar during one of our late night discussions on the phone. “Am I stunted? Do you think about it?”

“Hell no,” she replied. “I just want to be thrown against a wall and devoured.”

BE DESIRED

Sugar and I are in line with Marta Meana, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas and who has been studying sexology since the 1990s. Meana also disagrees intimacy is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

In a piece on the New York Times Magazine by Daniel Bergner, author of The Other Side of Desire, Meana emphasizes the role of being desired and the inherent narcissism in women’s sexuality, which she has gleaned from her laboratory and qualitative research, as well as her clinical work. Desire, she concludes, has “little to do with building better relationships,” or with fostering communication between partners.

“Female desire is not governed by the relational factors that, we like to think, rule women’s sexuality as opposed to men’s,” Meana told Bergner. “Really, women’s desire is not relational, it’s narcissistic.”

She is basically saying that women’s desire is dominated by the wish to be the object of erotic admiration and sexual need. That’s not to say women don’t want closeness and longevity—they do. But according to Meana, to imagine that these things are the catalysts of desire is incorrect.

“It’s wrong to think that because relationships are what women choose they’re the primary source of women’s desire,” Meana said. For women, “being desired is the orgasm.”

“How do you make yourself desired?” I asked my friends the following night over drinks at The Standard Downtown.

“Can I tell you?” my friend Tess asked, leaning in. “I like to dress up like a hooker and walk by construction sites. Instant desire.”

“Ew!” Sabrina exclaimed, laughing. “Girl, you’re a freak.”

“What? You leave your windows open when you change in case your hot neighbor is home!”

“Mmm,” Sabrina said. “He’s so hot.”

“Does he watch you?” I asked.

“Sometimes.”

“I like to dress myself in the sluttiest lingerie when no one is home,” I confessed. “There’s stuff I have that my husband has never even seen—not because he wouldn’t like it, but because it’s for me. I wear these things while I work. I love taking a client’s call in nothing but garters, a hat and stilettos.”

“Does desire require an audience?” Sabrina mused.

“You can be your own audience,” Tess said. “And if not, there’s always the internet.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Be Ethical, Be Legitimate. Anyone can work in adult marketing; there are many “designers, developers and marketers”. But I use those terms loosely because many “adult marketing companies” aren’t ethical. They under deliver, over charge and build websites on platforms that their client can’t understand, thereby making them slaves to the webmaster. When did the term adult become synonymous with the term idiot? Just because a client’s business is adult related, it doesn’t give their marketing team the right charge astronomical prices for third-rate service. Sooner or later, a client will speak up, vocalize their discontent and you will lose all your business.

Did you know? An individual adult entertainer usually makes $200,000 to $350,000 per year. A heavily marketed, niche adult website with creative, unique content can make up to $1 million per year. The average investment in marketing & publicity is about 15-20% of the gross income.

Being ethical and being legitimate is the first step in being successful.

Be More Than A Designer: Be A Developer, A Marketing Strategist, An Advisor and A Visionary. Anyone designing adult websites should be able to build just about anything. PHP, CSS, HTML, Java – I don’t care, you better know it and be able to do it well. I am not a designer, I am a marketing strategist; but my design team – Ope/Zig (the best) – can do anything a client needs them to do. They make it a point to test and demo all the adult related content management systems out there. By doing so, they know the best platform for any client site. If a client comes to us and loves what they have, we can work with it, but we work to improve it. If they don’t like it, they identify what isn’t working and develop several alternatives for them. If we have to, we will build what they want from scratch.

I strive to be more than designer, I strive to be a visionary. I not only create a site, I develop a strategy and a vision for the client. Now some clients aren’t ready for it, whether it’s a financial limitation or a mental step they aren’t to make yet, I make sure concept is there from day one. I visualize their BRAND and what it could be, even if they themselves don’t see it yet.

You have to ask yourself, “What is this company or individual’s five-year plan?” Next, work backwards from there. You are still building their brand, even if it’s an individual person and a name. You have to consider what would hurt that brand, what would dilute it and what would make it stronger. Throw in the average shelf life of adult name/product popularity and it’s some work!

If you have an idea that could be “The Next Step” and blow/transform their image into another lucrative income stream, you must present it to them, even if it’s risky. If you don’t present it, you are a bad marketer and don’t deserve their business. You need to be a visionary and an adviser because things in the adult market become tired quickly. It’s your duty to continually maximize their ROI; that’s what you are being paid for.

Have Standards and Integrity. This is where humanity comes in and I gotta get gritty. Our clients are people; treat them like people.

1. If you can’t get over nudity and provocative content, then this line work isn’t for you.
2. If you think you can use your status as an adult webmaster/marketer to try and meet adult professionals for your “personal” gain, then this line of work isn’t for you.
3. If you can’t imagine doing an online video series focused on selling couture sex toys and leveraging social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook to promote it and drive online sales – then EXIT STAGE LEFT.

What I Am Saying: Treat your adult clients like your corporate clients. Put all you know into practice and give them tangible results based on clear, ethical marketing practices. Make sure they have the proper tools to manage their content can do all the things they want to themselves. It allows you fill in the services that they fall short on and make you a more effective resource.

Play Nice With Others. There are great adult marketers out there. Play nice and make friends, you never know when you are going to need them. I keep in contact with the people I know have ethical standards and we trade and refer work whenever we need to. In fact, make sure you follow @PBVixen and @MasterRobyn on Twitter, these people have mad skills and I would work with them and for them anytime.

In a world where everyone on the Internet can claim to be an expert, who can you trust to present your adult brand with widely admired honesty and professionalism?

Well, the illustrious Alex Suze has created a very cool site - Sex Toy Buzz - that reviews products, video, literature and services that claim to be the best and puts them to the test.

Sex Toys Buzz is the latest venture from the team behind the incredibly successful AlexSuze.com site. The Sex Toys Buzz approach is built on years of developing trusted relationships with international adult product producers and retailers.

The Sex Toys Buzz philosophy is based on the belief that outstanding presentation of your products, visually and in terms of SEO, is crucial. It’s no good just throwing your ad in a link farm or having your product review buried on some un-searchable back page.

What I like: Clean and uncluttered layout and the adult toy reviews are complete and passionate. Reviews are performed in-house by and created around each product, not constrained by a list of standard criteria. The Alex Suze team understand that every product is different – and their reviews reflect that.

Nifty too: They’ve created professional-standard videos for many of the products they review. Hello YouTube generation.

Marketing Coo & Relevance: Alex Suze’s videos generate 25-30,000 views per month - that translates into great sales! So if you’re a manufacturer, service provider or retailer in the adult industry seeking to increase your profile, this a great way to or a consumer to get some hellified exposure!

For everyone else & all round sexual deviants: You now have another outlet for honest sex toy reviews.