Today let’s step back and look at right and wrong reasons for Twittering.

Being a Good Twitizen

Some Good Reasons for Twittering

• Read interesting information
• Do Marketing Research
• Spot trends
• Keep in touch with your customers
• Meet and communicate with interesting people
• Share what interests me
• Keep in contact with friends and family
• Keep up-to-date with news
• Giving Customer Service

Note: If you haven’t realized by now, Twitter lends itself to creating new words and bad puns based on the the name Twitter — feel free to join in.

See Oprah Tweet.

If you’ve thought about giving Twitter a try and joining the global conversation, but just haven’t got around to it — here’s a gentle introduction to the world of Twitter and micro-blogging.  The first part of the introduction will get you signed up for Twitter and your account personalized so that it best reflects who you are.

Getting Started

This is the easy part. Go to twitter.com and push the big green button and you’re on your way.

First you’ll have tell Twitter a little about yourself and what you want to be known as on Twitter.

Nothing very surprising here.  First, your full name, your Twitter Username and a password.  Good advice would be to actually show your full name and if you have a special nickname that you like to use, use that as your username — if you don’t have a nickname, try variations on your real name.  You’ll find that many popular usernames are already taken.

Give them an email address.  By default you are sent notifications of Direct Messages  (DMs) and when someone Follows you, but these can be turned off.  Enter those annoying verification codes and push the button.

Next you have a good chance to find out which  of your friends are already on Twitter.

If you use Gmail, Yahoo Mail or AOL Twitter will compare the email addresses in your address book to email addresses on Twitter and give you the opportunity to follow any of your friends that match up.

After you’ve added your friends, you’ll now get a chance to follow a few Twitter celebrities.  You can either pick them all, a few or none.  Showing my age when I looked over this list, very few were familiar to me.

Congratulations! You now have a Twitter account.

Personalizing Your Account

Next, let’s make the account really yours.

Choose settings from the menu in the upper right corner and then account from the sub-menu.

Since Twitter is really about having a conversation you’ll want to give Twitter people (tweeps) who look at your profile some information to allow them to know a little about you.

• Use the more info url box to type a link to somewhere else on the web that they can see more of you.  Popular links would be your blog, your work website, your Facebook page, your pictures on Flickr — you choose, but give them something to look at.
• The one line bio is your chance to be creative and show people a bit about yourself — use it.   You’ve got 160 characters to make your case as to why people should follow you.
• Location is where you live.  Use that one too, people like to be able to place you and, of  course, you’re proud of your hometown.  I live in Mountain View, CA — it’s a nice place to live.

If you were to want to have a private conversation with only a few intimate friends, you can protect your Tweets so that you’ll have to approve who sees them.  Don’t do this at this point in your Twitter experience, look around for awhile and enjoy the sheer mass of humanity on Twitter.  If  in the future, you really want to protect your Tweets, go back and do it then.

Next, let’s add your picture.  Those of us already on Twitter reading your Tweets will want to see what you look like.  Best suggestion is to use a real photo, not a cartoon or a picture of your cat (unless it’s your cat that’s Tweeting).   Your picture will be included with your every Tweet in your follower’s timelines.  A good head shot works best.  Choose your picture from your computer and upload it here.

And there we go, you now have a Twitter account and a personalized profile.  Now we’re ready for our first Tweet.

First Tweet

Choose Home on the menu and you’ll find the Twitter input screen.

Go ahead and write something short and interesting that you want to share.  You have 140 characters and then press update.

Don’t feel like you have to take the question “What are you doing?”  too literally.  Folks who over think that prompt have a tendency to just be boring.  ”Making toast” or “Having Breakfast” may be of vague interest to other members of your Weight Watchers group but probably not to the Twittersphere,

We’re finished and we’ve made a great start to our life on Twitter with a profile interesting enough to be followed.

Next – Twitter 102 – Tweeting, Following and Finding Followers

Since the goal of writing online is, not surprisingly, to have people read you, the general wisdom is that posts composed of lists to get more readers.  Look at the top articles on aggregating sites like Digg and you’ll always find lists.

That being said, here are my favorite lists of this week.  This list is focused mostly how  to do things better online,  with a bonus two for fun thrown in.  They tend to be a bit inside baseball about creating websites with a sprinkling of Twitter and social media.

• 7 Screenshot Capturing Tools For Windows – Several different approaches for capturing screenshots in Windows.  Seven? Well, maybe not actually seven.
• 16 Windows Live Writer Plugins For Bloggers –  If you want to write blog entries on Windows and don’t want to use your blog’s backend — Microsoft’s free Windows Live Writer is your best best.  Here’s a list of plug-ins to give it even more power.
• 50 Sites That Will Help You To Become a Better Designer – Tutorials and resources to help you learn and improve your designs.
• 35 WordPress Theme Releases for April 2009 – WordPress the software for most blogs — 35 themes to make yours look different than the other 1 million sites.  Enquiring Mimes, as do all Bluefugue media sites, uses the Thesis theme.
• 25 Inspirational 3D Typography Designs – Want to try 3D Type in your projects?
• 5 Great Web Design Resources – More website help.
• 13 Twitter Tips and Tutorials for Beginners – How to start Twittering from the very cogent Blog and Twitter-meister Darren Rowse.
• The Best Niche Social Media News Sites Right Now – A good selection of specialized social media news sites.
• 16 Biggest Tech No-Nos – A little technical and online ettiquette

The last  two are from cracked.com a site that has made lists an art.  For your amusement.

• The 7 Most Horrifying Parasites on the Planet – The picture at the lead is from this list, it’s a parasite that eats a fish’s tongue and replaces the tongue with itself, rather a la Alien.
• When Lobster Was Spam- 5 Gourmet Foods That Used to be Cheap – Amongst others, how do polenta become fancy?

What used to be said with pride, “I can do three things at once — I multi-task”, now seems like a fraud.

The simple fact is that you can only do one thing well at a time and other than actions controlled by the central nervous system or muscle memory like turning on the car blinker  when you get ready to make a turn or jumping rope, all actions need some level of concentration.

Hence the way to concentrate at work is to single-task.  This white-board is making the rounds.  I got it from marketing nirvana who got it from caterina.net.

The methodology this person developed for doing one thing at a time allows you to:

• send email at any time, but only check it a few times a day on schedule.

• Focus on only 1 to 3 activities a day.

• Minimize chat, which I guess means with co-workers and online (which would include Twitter).

I personally don’t see much hope in trying to be finished at 5:30 pm every day (unless I start at 5:30 am).

Here’s a refinement of the methodology.  Tell us what you think.

The highest bid, so far, is $1600.  The funniest tweet on his page, refers to his mom:

See Drew’s Twitter page and make a bid. It’s a way to give to charity with Drew having the skin in the game.