The legendary Guy Kawasaki, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author and Twitter aficionado talks about the strategies he uses for gaining incredible numbers of people following him on twitter. More than 180,000 people are reading his tweets as of October 2009. He talks about how there is no correct or incorrect way to use Twitter despite the challenging criticisms he gets from his followers on his strategy. He uses Twitter mostly promotionally just to build Alltop, a company he co-founded and loves dearly. Guy talks about how he is a broadcast network—more like PBS– as he educates his readers with his content-rich tweets. He uses ghost writers and discusses his transparency and tricks-of-the-trade.

Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group and formerly the key social media analyst at Forrester Research, talks to Marketing Voices about the latest trends in social media and marketing. Charlene provided these insights:

1. Social media will be like “air.” It will be everywhere and used by everyone. No one will be afraid to use the tools like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter—sharing information will be second nature.

2. Every employee can be a marketer. From the manufacturing floor to the executive offices of large and small companies, everyone in the company will be using social marketing tools as a way to build brand and visibility.

3. Everyone can be a marketing channel for you. What’s most important is whether these bloggers have the right audiences and have captured the minds and hearts of others.

4. People are putting the technologies (for example, Twitter and Facebook) first—not the business objective. People must first determine what they want to accomplish rather than learn how to use these technologies.

She is writing a new book that will be published early 2010 that is called Open: How Leaders Win by Letting Go. In this book, she explains how leaders in today’s businesses need to understand the need for communication transparency, letting go and not be so controlling in order to succeed.

Most of the time online interaction goes well for companies. Transparency is becoming more accepted and problems are rare. But what does a company or person do if they are attacked? Marketing Voices talks to Denise Shiffman, author of The Age of Engage and founder of Venture Essentials about what a company’s strategy should be if negative attacks happen.