18 tips for Twitter mastery

Advice to people not on Twitter:
JOIN then learn how to get the most out of it.

Advice to people already on Twitter.

1. Pick a topic to Tweet on and stick to that topic for that Twitter account


2. Consider having more than one account, maybe a busy one and a not-so-busy one


3. Complete the details in your profile to clearly show your interest in your topic


4. Choose very carefully who you follow


5. Unfollow anyone who is too noisy


6. Don't give away your religious or political preferences without reflecting on whether to show these things by who you follow


7. Don't follow noisy famous peole - look them up from time to time instead


8. Avoid following people who don't complete their profile or people who don't have web addresses


9. Follow people for a while then reconsider them.
   Maybe you would be better to follow one or two of their followers


10. Decide whether a person's followers are a better list to check


11. Decide each time whether to block any new followers


12. Block anyone who only ever has one message and keeps repeating it


13. Block any followers that follow lots of people and have few followers


14. Do not follow the links of people who follow lots of people and have few followers


15. Try to have more followers than people you follow


16. Try to have less updates than the people that you follow


17. Have a rule about time between updates - one per night?


18. Search a topic keyword before you post - what is known already?


19. Look at your own profile. Is it all retweets (RT) or responses? Try to vary between these and new postings.


20. Delete any of your updates that were a good idea at the time but that look out of place in your profile


21. Don't just plug your business.


22. Discuss articles on topics related to what you know. Only when people respect your opinion should you recommend product.


23. Think of the tweet as the ad for your blog posts


24. Hundreds of the right sort of followers are much better than thousands of rude video makers and spammers


25. Get the mood right. Start with a review of your profile.

Finally note that followers are listed in the order they followed. More recent ones are more likely to follow you back.
Winhelp.com.au as such is not on Twitter. We service two accounts on unrelated topics. From time to time we search for Help3 and related topics to keep abreast of changes in the industry.

Marketing to the Neighbours

BakerTweet.
I had thought that this was a good idea before I saw that someone had automated it:
feed://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/21645839.rss

Baker Tweet
BakerTweet is a way for busy bakers to tell the world that something hot and fresh has just come out of the oven. It's as simple as turning the dial and ...
www.bakertweet.com

Story of Stuff

This is a 21-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. It is a great use of a combination of animation and live video to explain a number of complex ideas.
It does teach you, it makes you laugh, and it may influence the opinions of the 7 million people who have viewed it.

Wikis for Business

One tool available to businesses for enabling teamwork and collaboration is the wiki.
You stay in the flow of your work by clicking “Edit This Page” where you see something that needs to be written or re-written.
[more]

Public Relations Research on Social Media

Coming soon from Public Relations Online - Thoughts & Theory: Special Issue of Journal of Public Relations Research on Social Media
Further to the previous post:
winhelp.com.au/labels/web2.htm

Social network and Web2 apps

Popular social networks and Web2 applications:
Twitter - Flavour of the month.
Best for keeping up-to-date your idols, a particular topic (eg. #surfing) and/or members of your team.

Linkedin - How timely.
If you think that there is a chance that you might be unemployed soon; hop on this network (don't look too desperate). Then if the crunch comes you might be able to use your presence here to get a job or at least to use it as a reference.

Blogger / MySpace / Multiply - DIY websites or a scrapbook.
All those people you call friends are by definition interested in what you do. Put a collection of your stuff somewhere where they can see it. I prefer Multiply for this purpose.

Facebook - "Friend collecting"
As an older person I use it to keep tabs (in a nice way) on my relatives in that Facebook age group. It helps that I am not the slightest bit judgemental.

It is by playing with tools that you learn how to use them.

Debategraph

Question: What is a an argument map with aspects of a wiki, a forum, a blog, instant messaging and social bookmarking?
Answer: Debategraph
Debategraph gives a visual representation of the intricate arguments and issues in a debate and participants can input their views to it.
http://debategraph.org
See a detailed description of an example:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7827112.stm

RSS introduction

RSS, Really Simple Syndication or "Atom" is a way to read and write information on the web. When reading you can keep track of more sites in less time and when writing you can share your words and ideas more quickly.
It is a method of publishing to the web. You write using blogs or other RSS writers. You read using an RSS reader of some sort. Examples include Outlook add-in to make emails from RSS to Google's home page that makes lines of links from each entry grouped under the heading for that feed. It probably should have been called a Really Flexible Syndication Tool.
Created by people who are service providers, tool vendors and independent developers, it is designed to be a universal publishing standard for personal content and weblogs. [more...]

Google your business

There are a number of developments at Google that are relevant to businesses, especially small businesses.
A good place to start to check them all out is subscribe to the RSS (see below for explanation of atoms, etc)
Google RSS feed is:
http://www.google.com/googleblog/atom.xml

Putting it all together

For years we have been saying "if you don't hurry up it will get easier".
NOW it is easy (and cheaper than you think).

Talk to us about making a website that allows you to:
* Update the website with your news items (using a simple web page interface)
* Syndicate these news items to anyone interested
* Connect with Google AdWords to put in place an income stream.

MSHelpWiki

www.mshelpwiki.com demonstrates and explains a Wiki.
Basically it is a website that users can add to, alter or correct. Seems like a good idea, and yes it is moderated, so the work of people who make a mess can be rolled back.
The content of the site is everything you need to know about online documentation, help file authoring and the Microsoft file formats for this purpose. We have been contributing to it.