When someone says “help me understand this Twitter thing” I always point them to the Common Craft video

@jowyang really gets Twitter and social media in general. I think this post from last year is a must read.

Web Strategy: What the Web Strategist should know about Twitter

He writes about company strategies and a point of view quite different than me. I think that’s why I enjoy reading his tweets and blog articles.

If you are following the book, this blog and the way @coachDeb and I tweet, you may wonder if we have any strategy.

How about you?

Is there a strategy that you had in place before starting on Twitter?

Is it part of the company plan?

Post your comments here, with your @ handle so we we can quote your in the book

Technorati Tags: twtiter, web strategy, Jeremiah Owyang,

@RobbMontgomery writes about the value of Twitter for newspaper editors and reporters

Opinion: Why Twitter matters to newspaper editors and reporters - editorsweblog

Do you still read a newspaper?

How much do you rely on Twitter for your news?

Post a comment about how Twitter use has affected your consumption of news media… we’ll be quoting you in the book, so be sure to include your name and Twitter @ handle.

Great article summarizing the current controversy

Twitter says they took their TOS from Flickr, which describes itself as a community.

Now Twitter say they are a communications service.

Should they be responsible for removing offensive content?

Post your comments here. Don’t forget your @ handle so we quote you in the Twitter Handbook

If you have a lot of friends you are following, you might have thought that there is no way to keep up with them all.

Here’s some ideas I’m using to follow thousands

1) Skim a lot. As a Twitter addict I must admit that I spend a lot of time looking through the feed. When I’m looking for new ideas, or trying to get a feel for what’s happening on a broad scale, I focus on tweets that don’t start with an @. Other times, the @ conversations lead to some of the most interesting people I follow

2) Use an aggregater. Some of my meat-space friends (and family) expect me to find and read every tweet they post. I create a link to catch there tweets daily at TwitterDigest This will allow you to get an RSS feed of a user or users conversations, or display a web page of the last days tweets. Here’s the latest from me

3) Use the profile page for the person you are following. I have a link to @coachDeb hooked to a button on the links bar of my browser. In an instant, I can see what she’s up to, and try to keep up with the many conversations she has going.

4) Instant Messaging. My IM client is always open to Twitter. Any mention of "Twitter Handbook" is displayed there. I can easily reply if needed.. and know when there is a lot of activity on that phrase. It also allows me to see DM’s before my Twhirl client gets updated.

As more and more people discover Twitter, and many more uses for the technology, we’ll have more data flowing to us. Tools are being developed to filter, extract and condense the information (who would’;ve thought.. 140 characters is too much? <grin>).

There’s not much chance of less data. So your choice is to ignore it, or try these methods to keep from spending all day trying to keep up.

What’s you favorite Twitter Time Saver?

Post a comment here.. so we can quote you in the Twitter Handbook. (be sure to include you @name and real name)

Are you a Graphic Artist?

Do you use Twitter & understand the community that is called the Twitterverse?

Interested in getting involved in a project to showcase your talent & get free PR?

Do you create covers for books?

If you answered YES to all of the above - we’re interested in meeting you!

Post your interest in this contest in the comment section below along with a link to your Web site where we can see a sample of your work.

We’ll either choose a graphic artist that best matches the ideas for the cover design for the Twitter Handbook that we have in mind - or hold a contest for this project and let the graphic artist who creates the BEST book cover design win.

In the meantime - who knows who else will see your work as a result of you posting your entry to this Graphic Design book cover design contest for the Twitter Handbook when it gets published and put on bookstore shelves everywhere.

Carol Dickson-Carr, @caroldc posted a video about finding balance and getting the most from your social media time.

A Holistic Approach to Leveraging Your Talents

I’ve been talking to Damon P. Cortesi about his TweetStats app. Great graphs of your twitter usage, or any other user. (one of the best looking Twitter related sites I’ve seen, fun and useful)

Damon agreed to an interview for the Twitter Handbook.. here it is:

How did you get started using Twitter?

I first signed up in December of 2006 and then my account lay dormant until May of ‘07 when I got a few friends on it. We’re geographically spread out, but would share our daily activities and it was really nice to be able to keep up with my friends. When Twitter introduced the “tracking” feature, my usage skyrocketed as it much easier to find people interested in the same things I was.

What motivated you to create an TweetStat?

I was just about to post my 2000th update and was curious how I had been using Twitter over that time and who I had been talking to. A couple hours and a perl script later, I had some charts that displayed my usage. Once I posted a screenshot of that, I found that others were interested in quantifying their Twitter usage but the script I released was limited to those familiar with perl on OS X with iWork Numbers. I took the opportunity to learn Ruby on Rails and make a web service that everybody could use.

What results have you seen from twitter use (and the app)?

Twitter has expanded my social circle, introducing me to people not only in my hometown of Seattle, but also across the world. For example, I met up with a fellow Twitterite in Amsterdam when I was there for a conference. We had never met in person before, but organized via Twitter, had a couple beers and some interesting conversation. It also allows me to keep in touch with my good friends in a way I hadn’t been able to previously - I’m horrible at keeping in touch. I think TweetStats introduced me to a number of people I wouldn’t have met otherwise. Much to the chagrin of some of my followers who are close friends in real life, I then started tweeting like crazy.

What’s planned for the future.
I hope to continue to provide even more useful information with TweetStats. Right now it’s a site that’s kind of fun, but is definitely lacking a definitive usefulness. While it’s great to be able to quantify your Twitter activity, I’d really love to dig into the data and provide some practical information to help people analyze their Twitter community in addition to their own activity. Unfortunately, as it’s merely a side project for me and as such, new features are generally slow to roll out.

Hundreds of tweets last night contributed to our first Twitcast and a whole lot of information for our book.

Thanks to all who followed and contributed.

Lessons learned.

1. Don’t expect anything social to go as planned.
2. The people rule and they don’t follow rules
3. People do want some guidance
4. Don’t count on technology, count on people

@CoachDeb and I spent only a few minutes deciding how to hold a TwitCast. We announced it for a start time of 7pm Eastern. Then, a few hours before, we postponed it to 7:30.

I got before 7 and had a few tweeps begging to begin. They were expecting something, but the “start” we had planned needed both of us. I handled it with twitter rules (”anything goes”) and posted a couple of ideas, links to hte blog post here where we wanted comments to be used as Twinterview for the book and answer questions.

@CoachDeb showed up and started posting about “getting started” while we figured out that twitter wasn’t responding near fast enough for her and I to go back and forth as fast as we do on chat. About then, I started getting questions about whether tweeps should post on twitter, the blog or both.. my answer “whatever you want”

I really thought it was dying down and posted instructions to read the feed using hashtags. That worked great except we soon discovered that the services for searching and compiling all follow a blacklist that has me banned (I follow too many people they say).

Once I figured this out, I stopped posting a lot of content and concentrated on replies. I couldn’t reply to as many as I would like, it would have totally been overkill for readers of my feed.

The messages went on for hours.. many times what we expected. Thanks again for all the great input.

Next time we do a TwitCast, we’ll be focusing on a more specific content, deciding in advance about the hashtag (or something else if the serivces don’t wise up how they are censoring users) and will try to give more advance notice.

All in all, a wonderful success. @AdamDesAutels was even more excited than usual in this video