guide

The one essential suggestion for effective Twitter beginners and gaining followers

January 18, 2009 By Dan Thornton

It may because I’m tired and a bit ill, and the fact I’m following an ever-increasing number of Twitter-related blogs, but it seems that there is a never ending stream of guides to starting on Twitter, or gaining followers, and 90% of them have the exact same advice. (Even the New York Times carries a Twitter beginners guide!)

For the record, I didn’t feel the need to do one after I read Luke Razzell’s excellent Twitter guide back in October. Search traffic be damned!

Whether you’re an individual or brand, the tips are always to be human, interactive, interesting etc. Which is basically the same as you’d get for any network, or for your offline life.

So I’d like to suggest that following most of these guides is a complete waste of time – if you’re a spammer by nature, or your company is in fact the work of evil robotic overlords, then you’ll revert to your true nature eventually, and you’ll have wasted everyone’s time until the mask falls.

Instead, I’ll present the one suggestion I think should be given out to everyone as the way I’d love to see people using Twitter.

Rule 1: Try to make other people’s lives suck a little bit less.

That’s it.

There’s no ‘how to’ guide because it varies for every individual. It could be providing great customer service (Do I need to reference @ComcastCares or @Zappos?). It could be by responding to someone asking for messages to demo Twitter to their colleagues, or finding a bookmark someone has lost.

Or it could even be auto-posting from your blog via Twitterfeed if that’s how people want to receive information (despite all right-thinking wisdom pointing to the contrary!)

It could be something more formal, like helping out with a great charity project like the Charity Water campaign by @Pistachio, or contributing to a personal attempt to help a family.

It could be posting something that makes someone think, laugh, cry or start a conversation.

It’s simple, but easy to overlook when you’re thinking about other things.

‘We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give‘ Sir Winston Churchill.

140char honoured in probably the best guide to Twitter…

October 30, 2008 By Dan Thornton

It’s amazing how the use of social networks, and increasingly microblogging networks like Twitter, can lead to the most wonderful examples of perfect timing!

I’ll be honest and admit that there have been times recently when I’ve wondered whether I’m committed enough to maintaining two blogs – particularly with the slow loading of the site and admin pages I’ve recently experienced, and the fact that all the other lovely contributors have managed to all get busy with their day jobs at the same time. Plus other sites have started appearing which have developed some of the original ideas for 140char a little further (particularly if they’ve had access to developers!). The most recent example is Just Tweet It, which does great directory listings for Twitter. Plus there’s some great blogs keeping track of the latest apps, like Twitterholics, the overview at Twittermaven, and the always great Pistachio Consulting Touchbase blog.

Plus I’m happy to be getting asked to contribute more and more to various projects at work to integrate social media – and I’m about to take a bit of an offline break.

So it took me a day or so to catch up with the source of a lot of buzz on Twitter – Luke Razzell’s awesome guide to Twitter.

I know there have been several guides to Twitter, and various posts about Twitter etiquette, but having finally sat down and had a look at Luke’s 11 page short paper, he’s combined being accessible for new users with being comprehensive for the more experienced. It’s also packed full of great examples (all hyperlinked). It really is that good!

And having read through it, I was amazed to find, on Page 10 ‘see 140Char for some sharp analysis of Twitter and its competitive landscape’

Blimey.

I had to check the url twice to make sure he meant me!

So I guess I better keep going! I’ve had quite a few ideas recently around revamping some of the site, and making sure the focus is on something different and complimentary from the other great blogs and sites out there. And there are a few things I think I can offer.

So although I may or may not have the opportunity to update over the next week, rest assured I will be back – and the site will be new and improved on my return (once I’ve sorted the email overload etc!). And there should be some new and interesting bits.

And in the meantime, go and download Luke’s paper. Read it. And then tell your friends, colleagues and readers.

And make sure everyone thanks Luke at @weaverluke.

How to use live twitting and tweets in events

October 14, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Here’s an interesting guide to live twitting from events – guest posted by Julius Solaris, blogger and event planner extraordinaire.
On the 29th of November 2008, I’ll be involved in ecoCampLondon a BarCamp about the environment and sustainability. The aim of the camp is to produce a document with all the discussion of the sessions. For the previous edition we just gave out a template which the session promoter needed to fill in. Boring and time consuming.
We felt that this solution was a bit 1999, so we decided to look at new ways to collect discussions. And here it goes: LiveTwitting

How does it work?
– Every attendee needs to follow either @livetwitting or @livet

– There are very simple commands to learn

FUNCTION	COMMAND
To start livetwitting	d livetwitting ON Name or ID of Conference # Session Title Example: d livetwitting ON BlogWorld 2008 # Keynote Example: d livetwitting ON 25 # Keynote
To record your notes	Just type away! Every status update will be recorded until you turn it off. You can send direct messages (d livetwitting your notes) if you don’t want to share your livetwitting with your followers.
To mark a segment with a Topic name (optional)	d livetwitting TOPIC Name of Topic
To mark a speaker (optional)	d livetwitting SPEAKER Speaker’s Name
To mark a Question & Answer segment (optional)	d livetwitting QA
To pause recording (i.e. to say hi to someone else)	d livetwitting PAUSE
To resume recording (after a pause command)	d livetwitting RESUME
To end livetwitting	d livetwitting OFF

– You can manage all the sessions talks on the LiveTwitting website.

BarCamps are a fork of Open Space Technology. The aim of these unconferences is to produce something in a team effort rather than just loosing all that precious interaction among attendees. When the method was elaborated it was the mainframe era and static websites were common. With Web 2.0 things change.
Twitter allows to capture conversations in a great unbiased manner and therefore should be used for most if not all conferences, tradeshows and events in general. The 140chars nature of the service pushes attendees to actually summarize what is going on and synthesize the content in a great way.
Making your event more compliant with new technologies is the way to go and you may be missing out on precious feedback and content if you fail to do so.

My next post may be delayed…Embedding youtube videos into powerpoint

February 13, 2008 By Dan Thornton

As I’m up to my neck in Powerpoint, trying to distill my knowledge, and that I’ve gained from others, into one neat presentation…

In the meantime, why on earth is it so hard to integrate a Youtube video into Powerpoint? There seems to be two options. Either a lengthy way to link to it online, or ripping it and converting it to a suitable format offline. Either method is a pain.

On the bright side, there are some Youtube videos to show the methods, ironically enough.
For Embedding Youtube into Powerpoint 2007, see here. (credit Maniactive.com)

And offline
Embedding offline into Powerpoint 2007, see here. (credit Maniactive.com)