TheWayoftheWeb

Content and Digital Marketing Specialists

laura fitton

In distinguished company

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I’ve just seen a really flattering post by the guys at ShoutEm, the ‘Roll Your Own Microblogging Community’ tool, which puts this little blog in distinguished company as one of the 4 Best Microblogging Blogs on the Web (their words, not mine!).

It’s great to be listed alongside the guys at Microblink, the rightly micro-famous Laura Fitton, and the Problogger himself, Darren Rowse’s TwitTip.

It’s also made me feel a bit guilty, as I’d be the first to admit posting has dropped recently, due to some reasons I can’t share quite yet. But the next couple of days should see some things fall into place, and some changes happening pretty quickly. Plus much, much more posting!

It was also fun to see someone pick up on the Tweet of the Week series – definitely something which will be continuing on a more regular basis (hopefully weekly before I end up having to change the name!)

Jumping back into the Twitter Stream with Twitter for Dummies

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Much like the constant updates of Twitter itself, picking what to write about after a break enforced by work/family is tricky as a huge amount of microblogging and Twitter coverage flows through my RSS feeds on a daily basis – so expect plenty of catching up shortly.

The admirable Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) reminded me this morning that there’s only a week left for open contributions to Twitter for Dummies.

The good thing is that you don’t need to write everything up:

‘Want to see your tip, idea or case study in Twitter for Dummies? Submit it today and get your friends to vote it up. We can’t include everything, but we’ll mention as many of the best ones as we can.

A line or two is enough, or a link to the full story. You don’t need to write it up completely here.

Vote on ideas by category and add your stuff too. Click the categories in the sidebar to go through them one at a time. Thanks!

–Advanced tips and techniques
–Business and Twitter
–Case Studies – Business
–Case Studies – Personal
–Etiquette
–Facts and Factoids
–Favorite Twitter Tools
–Government/Politics and Twitter
–How to Grow Your Network
–NOMINATE THE CHARITY
–Nonprofits and Twitter
–Personal use of Twitter
–Security
–Sharing multimedia
–SUGGEST A NEW CATEGORY
–Tips for New Users
–URL Shorteners
–Uses of Twitter
–What NOT to Do

We’ll keep taking ideas for one more week — until Wednesday, April 8, 2009. We can’t guarantee your story will make it into the final edition. We CAN guarantee that the most popular charity submitted and voted up will get 10% of the royalties from book sales.’

So as long as you interact by Wednesday, you’ll get to share some knowledge, possibly be listed in a Dummies guide, and raise some money for charity.

Making charity happen via Twitter

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Twitter marketer and celebrity Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) has come up with a great charity campaign over Christmas, having realised that just $2 from each of her followers would mean $25,000 – enough for a water project for a school or hospital by Charity Water.

The impetus for this is the fact that 5,000 children die every day from the lack of clean drinking water.

And as a bonus, if $10,000 plus gets raised, it’ll be matched by Tipjoy and Betaworks. Plus all fees are being waived for micropayments via Twitter for this case by Tipjoy.

But Laura puts it far more passionately and eloquently than I can (plus there are more details on the charity, payments, and even an easy form to use), so

If that isn’t enough, Squidoo is also giving money to charity – Every time you tweet a message from the list of 21 charities, it’s a vote which means $1 is donated to that charity (one per person, per day), up to a maximum of $30,000.

Both might be slightly overshadowing my own Twitter charity pledge – @digitalmaverick and myself are racing to 2000 followers, with the loser doing a charity forfeit. Plus I’m giving £20 to a charity chosen by my 2000th follower!

Twitter to provide for internal company use….

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A really useful article by Laura Fitton (@pistachio) on Mashable comparing 15 microblogging tools for enterprises also reveals an important and interesting quote on Twitter from Ev Williams. ( Laura has kindly clarified in the comments that she referenced the list of tools maintained by Jeremiah Owyang)

‘Private networks that do private or company-internal sharing via Twitter are on the horizon,’

This is big news considering the size of Twitter relative to all other microblogging platforms. I’d suggest their advantage is to create the private areas within the larger Twittersphere, as one of the problems of tools such as Yammer is that for normal businesses (i.e. non early-adopter tech firms), there simply isn’t critical mass.

Allow early adopters to connect within a company, and frame that within the larger Twittersphere, and it keeps the interest up while allowing the company users to grow.

(Then again, if it’s coming at the same speed as restoring IM functionality etc, it may be some way off!)

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