This evening I log onto Twitter and every so often I make it a point to look at the trending topics. At the top of the trending topics was I-75. That immediately sparked my interest to make me want to find out what was happening on Interstate 75 – apparently a gasoline tanker had exploded into flames with the blaze melting the overpass.

Is it surprising that Twitter is the first source of information for a good number of people? A quick scan of the aforementioned sites had stories about Richard Jefferson getting cold feet or a 23 quadrillion credit card bill. Maybe it’s just me, but I think the collapse of a major highway that serves 160 thousand motorists a day deserves a little bit more attention than a guy deciding he wasn’t ready for marriage.

You’ll no doubt hear the critics say that Twitter cannot be trusted as a news source due to vulnerability to hoaxes, inaccuracy etc. In today’s example, we were able to see images such as this one:

Not unless this is a scene from an upcoming summer blockbuster, you can’t make this stuff up. I mean, how much verification is needed to make user accounts trustworthy. Were people still doubting when the first pics of the plane on the Hudson emerged? I don’t discount the fact that inaccurate information is going to be broadcast over social networks. Surely those thirsting for verification eventually get their satisfaction through the trusted media houses.

One thing we have to note is the change in how we receive information. We have CNN iReports for instance, which is user generated content. Critics may call it whatever they want, but in this web 2.0 age, I don’t need a detailed report on a news item. A summary works just as well for me, such as in this instance where all I needed to know was that the I-75 bridge collapsed after a tanker explosion.

Love it or hate it, Twitter is and will continue to be a source of news, providing users with information faster than traditional news sources.

• Don’t Take Your Status Update Too Literally: A lot of new “Twitterers” take the question “What are you doing now?” too literally. Check out this clip for a second.

In the humorous clip above, one of the subjects “twotted” all over the place – “Just got to work”, “Sitting in my chair now” etc. Just today, my co-worker said to me that he wasn’t keen on joining Twitter because he’d be tweeting what he was doing all the time. You should not feel compelled to tell people what you are doing all the time, especially if it is everyday daily living tasks.

Instead, tell people about your experience at the grocery store, how the movie you saw yesterday sucked, a website you liked, a book you read, a great quote that can inspire others, basically something others can relate to. I honestly don’t think you are that much of a loner.

• Tweet Often: If you only tweet every so often, chances are you would easily disappear into space. The reason behind this is that Twitter shows you what people are saying in real time. It is not going to show you tweets  since the last time you logged in. People tend to engage more with people that appear often on their twitter feed.
• Engage Others: Don’t make it all about you. Reply to other people’s posts and if you like them, retweet them. Direct message them if you don’t want others viewing your conversation. Up until you figure out that monologue is a very lonely state, you’ll never get to experience the joys of Twitter. Conversations can help you connect to others of similar interests or build relationships with those you already connect with.
• Profile Name: For the life of me, I could never understand why people use twitter IDs that absolutely don’t make any sense. Am not talking about names that others may know you by or that reflect your brand such as “the love coach”. Am talking about the completely random ones like “bhYxtPws”. It doesn’t quite make sense when I can’t figure out your username and have to use the “Find People” feature.
• Profile Pic: Dating websites would tell you that you have a much greater chance of getting a response if you have a pic posted. Same goes for Twitter and other social networking sites for that matter. People tend to respond more to you if they have an idea of who they are interacting with.
• Bio: Tell people a little bit more about yourself and what things you may share in common. This plays an important part in determining whether someone will follow you. If you have a website where people can know more about you, by all means share it. But whatever you do, please don’t list your Twitter page as your website (read “redundancy”).
• Watch Your Follow Ratio: It is not rare to find a new Twitter user trying to acquire as many followers as they can. You have to remember that this is not a contest and building up your follower list is going to take some time. If you are following 450 people and only 45 are following you back, you ending up appearing like a spammer. The best approach is to gradually follow more people as your number of followers increase.
• Don’t Over-Promote Yourself: You’d probably not believe me if I told you this, but I’ve observed one user whose every tweet had the same shortened URL, which was directed a page that asked you to sign up for their services. How this individual managed to maintain this large of a following still beats me. Am not saying you shouldn’t link back to your page, just be gentle with it and make sure your linking is appropriate to your tweet.



• Make Use of the Search Feature: Surely everyone has a topic that interests them. The most common method people use to find information is by performing a search. With Twitter now, you can perform a search right out of your web interface. While Google search results involved indexed entries, Twitter search results are real time and you get your info as best described by ordinary people like you & me as opposed to some news caster so you get a better opinion of the issue at hand.
• Twitter Tools & Other Applications: Twitter has an array of excellent tools and other applications that you can use for a variety of purposes from finding other like minded “Twitterers” to applications that allow you to use Twitter on the go or provide you with a much greater experience than the web version. Find one that works for you and you’ll be totally amazed.

Hope you were able to find this post informative. If you did, please feel free to share it with others.

As can be seen from the graphic above, you have the option to view your followers/following in a List or Expanded View. The view above is the Expanded View that shows you the person’s last tweet. If you look to the right of the screen shot, you’ll notice a menu which then allows you to perform a variety of actions, including:

• replying to the person
• direct messaging the person
• following the person
• blocking the person

Of course, if you don’t like the Expand View, you can collapse it to the List View which just shows you the same information without the preview of the last tweet.

I believe this is a useful addition as the ability to view the person’s last tweet has some bearing on your decision to follow them back or not.

I would be interested in your thoughts on this. You could always tweet me @kevinkute or comment below.

When I looked at her public timeline, I was immediately impressed at how she performed her #followfriday recommendations. Take a look at a screen shot of her tweets.

Immediately, you notice something that is missing from many a #followfriday tweet >> The reason why she is making the recommendation. Take a look at the example of @careerengineer above who she endorses for timely and relevant career tips or to get your career back on track. Remember, the whole rationale of #folllowfriday is to suggest to your friends/followers people that are worth following. Your #followfriday recommendation should provide your friends/followers some value in regards to how your recommendation would add to their network.

Another thing I noticed from her tweets is that she almost always begins with ” I follow @xyz because of abc” or “do you have this problem, then follow @xyz because of abc”. I would say this would probably be way more meaningful than the typical tweet that sounds something on the lines of “@a @b @c #followfriday”. The tweets either tell you why the recommender follows the recommended or provide you a solution to your problem in the form of the recommended.

That leads me to my last and final point. When making a #followfriday recommendation, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do not begin your tweet with @username and here’s why. Initially, your friends/followers were able to see all of your @replies. But then Twitter decided that that was too confusing for newbies. If you send @reply to someone, your followers would only be able to see the tweet if they followed both of you.

The whole point of #followfriday is to suggest to your followers people that they weren’t already following. As explained in the previous paragraph, if you begin your #followfriday tweet with @username….your followers that aren’t following this prospect didn’t see the tweet…which totally defeats the whole purpose. The one way to maintain the integrity of #followfriday is 1) give a reason why you’re making the recommendation 2) include the recommended’s @username anywhere BUT in the beginning of your tweet.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with others. Also, if you’re not already following me on Twitter, you may do so here.

I think I make a fairly decent assumption that you have no doubt heard about Twitter. The other night I was at a diner and the TV was tuned to CNN’s Larry King Live Show. On the show were Ashton Kutcher, P Diddy and joining them by phone was Jimmy Fallon. The topic – Kutcher beating CNN to 1 million friends (in twitter lingo – followers). And I thought to myself “Do I really need to watch this?”. As in, probably the most respected news network in the world was having an hour segment to discuss Twitter?

Here’s a short clip of the Daily Show With Jon Stewart.

Yeah, what is this Twitter Frenzy anyway?

The names you saw earlier and on the video are high profile names, consisting of celebrities, politicians and news personalities. One of those personalities even used Twitter last year while running for office. No brownie points if your guess was the President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Fancy celebrities?  Twitter keeps you up to date with the latest 411. And there are countless celebrities too. If you’re into politics, you just saw in the clip above how politicians use Twitter. Twitter has even changed the way news is brought to you. Ever noticed how CNN news anchors Rick Sanchez or Don Lemon use Twitter? They feature their Twitter feeds during their news casts. Look at even radio stations; you almost always hear the DJ telling listeners to ‘hit them up on Twitter’. To cut a long story short, ordinary people can interact with extraordinary personalities in a way that they weren’t able to before. There’s no busy signal or secretary who won’t transfer your call. You are linked directly.

Speaking of news, Twitter is fast becoming a  news source. Remember the plane that skidded off the runway in Denver or the plane that crashed landed on the Hudson River or the terrorist attacks in Mumbai. News of those events broke out on Twitter before news channels even pieced together what was going on. Twitter will be an important source of current info, perhaps even beating out the news networks to it.

Have you ever wanted to find out what people are saying – in real time I might add? If you’re not familiar with the term real time, I am talking about 2 seconds ago not 2 days ago. Picture this; traditionally, if I wanted to find out about a topic, I would Google it. If I did that however, I would find information that would be from 2 days ago, perhaps 2 years ago. Even worse is that information may not appear on Google until it has been indexed and ranked. This weekend (Apr 25th/26th) will be the NFL draft. Say I wanted to find out about what other NY Jets fans thought about the draft picks, I would do a Twitter search of the word “Jets” and any time anyone on Twitter mentioned the Jets, my search page would instantly notify me that there was an update. Not only do I get up to the second update of my football team, it is also user generated content.

So you like what John Doe from St Louis is saying about your team. Twitter gives you the opportunity to connect with other like minded people. One question that was posed to me was “Is Twitter about making friends with strangers?” The person that asked the question happens to be a blogger so I will use that in an analogy. As a blogger, you have people that read your blog. You might not know them, but you wouldn’t call them strangers, you’d call them readers or subscribers. If  I had a store, I wouldn’t refer to the gentleman that walked in as a stranger, I’d call him my customer. And they don’t need to be strangers at all. They could be people you attended a class with, or met at a conference or someone whose book you’ve read. When I was starting out on Twitter, my friend on Facebook and Twitter Esther Jacobson gave me this quote from another of our friends Jim Turner, a Social Media Marketing Strategist “You make friends on Facebook but you build relationships on Twitter“.

Why do I need to connect with them again? Let’s put it this way, my philosophy is “Everyone you meet knows something you don’t, learn from them”. I think I can safely assume that no one makes it in this world alone. You need a supporting cast. On Twitter, you can have your questions answered or you can exchange ideas. You do not even need to own a blog. You may need help with your research paper. Just type in your question and see your responses come in or type in a query and see what ordinary people are saying about it. By the same token, if you come across someone that needs help, you can share your knowledge with them.

Is Twitter a chat room? If you want it be, except chat rooms don’t come close to doing anything that Twitter can do for you. I remember this saying from a while back that a computer by itself is dumb if you don’t tell it what to do. The same is true of Twitter. Look at Twitter’s home page and see how relatively simple it is. So much tidier than Facebook. Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is still great . If I could play Scrabble on Twitter, that would be awesome, but then again that would be pushing my luck too far. You, yes – you, have to make Twitter work for you.We (meaning you and I) have seen the most ingenious uses of Twitter, starting from getting the President of the United States getting elected to real time news to doctors performing surgery to marriage proposals. I bet you even as you read this someone just pulled off a great use of Twitter.

Whether you decide to join Twitter or not is up to you. If you do, great. My subsequent posts will show you how to make the most of it. If you decide not to, still great…but I bet you’ll hear the word Twitter or tweet so much you’ll have no other option. When Facebook was first available, I signed up but never used it – even to the point that I couldn’t remember my password. I don’t need to rub in Facebook stats for this point in time, but you get the point…Twitter is growing and will only be going up. Don’t miss out on it.

If you like this post, please join me follow me on Twitter by clicking here —> Kevin on Twitter.

Just to get the proper perspective, people use social media for various reasons. Take Facebook for instance. Some people use it to connect with family and friends (even their stalkers). Some use it to connect with their schoolmates or co-workers. Yet another group use it for business. A very interesting portion of them use it for all of the above.

With this in mind, how do you balance your personal relationships with your business relationships? A few people actually maintain more than one profile on a variety of social media platforms. However, I think the greater majority would agree that that would be somewhat of a tedious task to undertake. I would say that a general norm would be that it is acceptable for your elementary school friends or your neighbor to be your friend on Facebook, just as long as they understand that you are there for business (read No Pillow Fight Invitations).

My Facebook Status Updates originate from Twitter 99% of the time. The characters you see above would most likely be from a friend that updates their status via Twitter. I would say that majority of my friends on both Facebook and Twitter would understand my Twitter lingo. After all, it is a somewhat conventional practice to be connected on more than one social media platform. However, there is that tiny percentage that I probably drive crazy. My one Facebook friend (we actually used to be in high school together) even went as far as making up his own Status Updates that included a little bit of everything he had seen in my updates. Irony is, he is a dentist – am working on showing him how social media can work wonders for his business.

So what is that # sign I keep seeing anyway?  The # sign is known as the hashtag symbol in Twitter and is used to denote a topic on Twitter. It is user defined and it is created by quite simple as just placing the symbol # in front of a topic e.g. #superbowl. My Status Update could be “Warner just hit Fitzgerald for a 42 yard touchdown #superbowl”. Anybody who sees my Status Update would recognize that I was referencing the Superbowl. The hashtag #superbowl makes it easier to do searches. A “#superbowl” search would yield far greater results than a “Warner” or a “Fitzgerald” search.

A @ sign directs your Status Update to a specified user. A Twitter update that has an @kevinkute anywhere in it is directed towards me. I could easily find any references to my username with any of the many Twitter applications or via the Twitter search engine.

Finally, there is RT. RT is short for retweet. In Twitter terms, retweet simply means that you are repeating a tweet by someone else. Why would you want to repeat something that someone else said, you might ask. If you hear something that you thought would be helpful to others, wouldn’t you want your friends to know about it? By retweeting, you are not only sharing with your friends, but you are also acknowledging the original poster of the message.

Hopefully as a Facebook user you will now be able to make some sense of the Status Updates of that friend that always seems to use language you can’t quite seem to understand.

Notice the screen shots of both applications below:

They remind me of a term I haven’t heard in a while – Graphic User Interface. The two applications have an almost similar graphic user interface meaning the two applications are presented to the user in an almost similar fashion.

Notice any striking similarities? The Public tab on Blip.fm = the Everyone (Public) tab on Twitter, the Home tab on Blip.fm = the Home tab on Twitter, the Profile tab on Blip.fm = the Profile tab on Twitter. Blip.fm updates are in reply to the question “What song do you want to blip?” (formerly “What are you listening to?”) while Twitter updates are in reply to the question “What are you doing?”. Blip.fm has Replies and so does Twitter (although Replies on Twitter Web edition have morphed into Mentions Of). Blip.fm has reblip while Twitter has retweet. Listeners on blip.fm can be compared to Followers on Twitter. Playlists on blip.fm can be compared to Favorites on Twitter. I guess blip.fm beats out Twitter in that you can give Props or thumbs up for a good blip if you wished to but you can’t do that do that for a good tweet.

Those are similarities you can visually notice immediately. To give you an idea of how integrated these two applications are, I calculated how many Twitter updates originated from Blip.fm in the space of one hour: the result was 1721 or roughly 29 tweets a minute. I believe that this figure could have easily gone way past this because some people are more twittaholics than they are blipaholics.

Many trends you see on Blip.fm are hallmarks of Twitter. Think of the @ sign. Nice thing about Blip.fm is, it allows you to broadcast fine tunes while having the ability to annotate that with a message, a thought etc. A really great example of this would be blips from Blip.fm DJ CarolAnnB (also CarolAnnB on Twitter). If you use Twitter regularly, you are likely familiar with the hashtag #followfriday. CarolAnn makes it so much more fun by adding a #twitterexpress component to it i.e. recommending people to follow on Twitter while adding some feel good music from Blip.fm. If that isn’t genius then I don’t know what is. If you’re not tuned into her station on Blip.fm or following her on Twitter I highly recommend you do.

Hashtags i.e. the # sign are not a feature of Blip.fm however but as discussed earlier, a lot of users have accounts on either network which wouldn’t baffle them to see hashtags # in blip annotations. Blip.fm allows you 150 characters as compared to Twitter’s 140 characters. One theory states that the 10 extra characters are for the blip URLs such as http://blip.fm/~3ttoi

As with any social network platform, a few pointers:

When you blip a song, add some annotation to it. Blipping a song without any annotation is link posting a link on Twitter without any insight as to the target of the link. This is especially true if your updates filter into Twitter. Your followers will probably look at a lonely link and wonder “Why do I need to click on this again?” for instance I would annotate some few lyrics so that others may try and recognize the song.

When you hear a song that you want to blip via another Blip.fm DJ, give them the credit by reblipping the original blip. Am not saying that only one person can blip the song. You may be tuned into one of favorite DJs and you hear a song that makes you go “darn, why didn’t I think to blip this track before?” Reblip – shows the other DJ you appreciate them plus they automatically get a prop when you do. I normally add an @ reply in the annotation so that the Blip.fm DJ sees this in their Replies.

With all said, happy blipping and happy tweeting.

Courtesy: Tweetdeck.com

TweetDeck, a desktop Twitter application, released version v0.25b today.

Upon opening TweetDeck, a dialog box would appear notifying the user that there was an update available. After updating, there are several noticeable changes to TweetDeck, one of them being that the TweetDeck icon now has a gold background.

The Facebook Status Updates icon above the Tweet window activates a dialog box that would allow you to log onto Facebook, thereby giving TweetDeck access to pull your Facebook Status Updates. Take note that if you were already logged onto Facebook on your browser, logging through TweetDeck logs you off the browser version. Facebook only allows one instance of your log-in to be active unlike Twitter (recall the Twitter hacks of January 3rd and 4th 2009?).

Once you are logged onto Facebook via TweetDeck, TweetDeck will still feed your Facebook Status Updates even if you choose to return to your browser (read logging into Facebook again).

Just remember to have enough TweetDeck columns such that you are able to view the new column you will have created. As shown in the illustration above, I would not advice more than 4 columns. The 4 columns I use are All Friends, Replies, Direct Messages and Facebook: Friends Status. Incidentally, I think TweetDeck should have taken the cue from Twitter and renamed the Replies columns “Mentions”.

Other Facebook actions you can do via TweetDeck is Facebook Chat. You can also see which of your Facebook friends are online via a green dot that appears next to their name. Clicking on a Friends name opens up the link on your default browser.

The other major revision in this update is to the right of the Tweet window. Users now have the option to send the Status Updates to Twitter, Facebook or both. I think it is a very great thing that you can now view both Twitter and Facebook Status Updates on the same platform. However, I am not going to do the happy dance just yet because (1) I update my Facebook Status via Twitter 99% of the time (2) I always access both Twitter and Facebook, therefore if I wanted to update Facebook only, then I would update from Facebook itself (3) There are Facebook applications that allow you to select which of your tweets make it to Facebook. It would appear to me that this would only work to increase the popularity of TweetDeck, already considered one of the most used Twitter applications.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this one.