Twitter Who Cares What You\'re Doing Right Now, Anyway

SOURCE: IMPLEMENTINGSCRUM.COM

Twitter
Who Cares What You’re Doing
Right Now, Anyway?
BY SCOTT ABEL, SOCIAL MEDIA CHOREOGRAPHER * THE CONTENT WRANGLER, INC. * 760.969.3249 * SCOTTABEL@MAC.COM
WWW.THECONTENTWRANGLER.COM * WWW.TWITTER.COM/SCOTTABEL * THECONTENTWRANGLER.NING.COM

Thursday, June 11, 2009

What is Twitter?
It’s a microblogging website; one of the
fastest growing networks on the planet

"Twitter is a device-agnostic real-time
message-routing platform—which is a
fancy way of saying that it can send
messages to and receive them from a
variety of devices simultaneously, at the
moment a message is sent."

Sarah Millstein, author of “Twitter and the
Micro-Messaging Revolution” (O’Reilly)

What is a Tweet?
A post to Twitter is called a Tweet, a 140 (or
fewer) character text message

What are Tweets about?
They can be status updates, tips/tricks,
announcements, ads, responses, etc.

What is a reTweet?
A post to Twitter that was posted previously
by another user; provides attribution

Twitter: A simple idea
The original sketch of the Twitter interface;
designed as a status updating tool

Twitter: The ﬁrst iteration
Status updates from you to your friends who
want to know what you are doing

What are you doing now?
It’s not always easy to see the value in
answering this simple question

"I started using Twitter and then decided it
was just too much trouble and I really
don't want that much information coming
at me all day long. So, I deleted my
account."

Lisa Seaburg, President, Aeon (XML
consulting ﬁrm)

"I use it to inform, get news and plug links
I ﬁnd. In my opinion, I think that there are
a few too many people expressing ‘the
right way’ to use Twitter. The whole point
is that it is random. It also integrates with
your Facebook status, which is very
helpful."

Monica Valentinelli, copywriter, web analyst


"Many people use Twitter for
communicating with friends and family. I
use Twitter for networking and personal
branding. Most of my tweets are business-
oriented. I also ﬁnd that Twitter is a great
tool for companies to use in their
marketing and PR efforts."

Pamela Abbazia, SEO Strategist


"I use Twitter for a variety of reasons. Most
importantly, I use it as persistent
messaging between myself and my
distributed development team when I need
to interact with them between live/virtual
meetings. I prefer it over email and IM for
short discussions and quick thoughts.”

Robert Bectel, Managing Partner, Quorum
Sense Consulting

"Additionally, I use Twitter to follow the
ﬁndings of a select few innovative people/
groups that provide links to interesting
solutions as well as articles and traditional
blogs. By following smart folks, I have
access to an intelligent ﬁlter for marketing
and interactive content.”

Sense Consulting

"Finally, I use it to communicate with my
wife. Our “Tweets” move quickly to email
and mobile devices which we both have,
and guarantee that we aren’t missing
important messages such as ‘Honey, get
the kids from school. My meeting is
running long’.”

Sense Consulting

"I use Twitter to promote the store --
speciﬁcally to post upcoming tasting
events (and a reminder on the day of the
event), just-arrived beers, to promote new
content on our store blog, and notify folks
of any special hours or weather closures.”

Tiffany (Hereth) Adamowski, Technical Writer
and part time beer store manager

Twitter today: How it works
Step one: Set up an account


Select a Twitter name
Personal brand (or handle) or real name


How it works
Step two: Find folks to follow


Finding folks to follow
Skim the Twitter public timeline:
http://twitter.com/public_timeline

Clicking on a photo or user name takes you
to that member’s proﬁle page

Sometimes, they find you
Posting to Twitter also exposes your profile,
your Tweets, and makes you findable

Following
When you follow someone, you can see their
Tweets - they don’t necessarily see yours

Following
Twitter allows you to see a threaded view of
your conversations with others

The “build it and they will come” mentality
isn’t enough to gain large audience

Twitter can tap into other services you
already use to invite your “contacts”

Twitter can email your friends, prospects,
co-workers with a personal note from you

Twitter can “match” you with others that
you may be interested in following

Third-party services are also a good way to
locate followers of interest; search by topic

Keyword search tools can help you spot and
automatically follow interesting folks

Deciding who to follow
You can also use third-party services like
Mr. Tweet - there are many others

You can also search the “Twitterverse” using
http://search.twitter.com

Real-time results show who is using your
search term; Follow those that interest you

Revealing conversations
Twitter search also shows you the
conversation thread, which can be useful

How it works
Step three: Create some interesting posts
(Tweets) designed to attract followers

@ replying to a Tweet
Use @ before a username to respond to a
Tweet so everyone else can see

RT (reTweeting)
Use RT before @username to give attribution
to the person who made the original post

Tweets
Text and special characters - 140 characters
or fewer, including URL, RT, @

Following others
Clicking the “Follow” button is all that’s
required to follow another user

Following others
Once you are a “follower” you will see this
user’s posts when you view Twitter feed

Following others
Once you follow someone, and they follow
you back, you can contact them (via DM)

Twittiquette
Rules and suggestions for best results


Rule #1
Block mass followers; Following a lot of
people, has few followers, made 1 post

Rule #2
If you can’t say it in 140 characters, write a
blog post about it and point folks to it

Rule #3
Publish fresh, useful, relevant content; Avoid
“Me too!” posts

Rule #4
Decide whether you are posting professional
or personal content; Don’t deviate often

Rule #5
Be selective about whom you follow (this
depends on your intent, obviously)

Error messages
Twitter error messages are often funny,
creative gems that yield a quick smile

Twittervision
There are many cool and innovative services
built on top of Twitter data via the API

Twittervision in 3D
Services are being created from Twitter data
every day; There’s always something new

Twistory
Services are being created from Twitter data
every day; There’s always something new

Tweets and Google
With a snippet of code you can make your
web browser display Twitter results, too!

Tweets and RSS feeds
You can search Twitter and make the results
an RSS feed that you can reuse elsewhere

Twictionary
A dictionary of Twitter terms and jargon


TwitTrans
One one free translation service; Send tweet
and wait for translated response

Measuring success
There are a wide variety of services
dedicated to rating, ranking your efforts

The future and Twitter
High proﬁle bloggers have replaced writing
daily blog posts with frequent Twittering

TWITTER LINKS OF INTEREST
TWITTER.COM/SCOTTABEL * SCOTT’S TWITTER FEED
TWITTER.COM/STCSANDIEGO * SAN DIEGO STC
MRTWEET.COM * RECOMMENDS FOLKS TO FOLLOW
TWINFLUENCE.COM * MEASURES REACH, RANKS USERS
SEARCH.TWITTER.COM * REAL-TIME TWITTER SEARCH
BITLY.COM * SHORTENS URLS, TRACKS LINK CLICKS
TWITPIC.COM * SEND PHOTOS VIA TWITTER
PING.FM * AUTO-ROUTES TWEETS TO OTHER SERVICES
TWITTERVISION.COM * ENTERTAINING TWITTER USE
TWEETDECK.COM * STREAMLINES NOTIFICATIONS
TWITTERHOLIC.COM * RANKS TWITTER USERS

SCOTT ABEL, SOCIAL MEDIA CHOREOGRAPHER
THE CONTENT WRANGLER, INC. * 760.969.3249
SCOTTABEL@MAC.COM
WWW.THECONTENTWRANGLER.COM
WWW.TWITTER.COM/SCOTTABEL
THECONTENTWRANGLER.NING.COM


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