Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

VentureBeat reports that, according to an InternetNews overview of the use of Twitter in business, that Dell has earned $1 million this year by using Twitter as a marketing tool. People who follow Dell on the micro-messaging service we all love get automated alerts about sales, with direct links to the items in question. These sales can be forwarded along to others (”retweeted”), making the information viral. I don’t follow Dell, but I do follow Amazon–and I have to say, I’ve caught some good deals.

How can we borrow from this idea? It’s actually really easy to automatically post to Twitter from any site that produces an RSS feed, such as a blog. I use a service called twitterfeed.com to post most of the messages from @stratepedia. The only hitch some of you may have with it is that it uses OpenID for login, but once you’ve got that set up it’s smooth sailing. (We talked about OpenID last week in our own login system update.)

Twitter has made Dell $1 million in revenue (VentureBeat, Dec. 15, 2008)

Those of you who follow me on Twitter (@ruralocity) know how much I’ve been digging TweetDeck the last few days. It’s got some compelling features that make Twitter even more useful, especially as the number of Twitterers you follow grows.

I was going to do a little screencast about TweetDeck, but thanks to the wonders of social media and YouTube, I don’t have to. Here’s a nice clip that should give you an idea of just how handy TweeetDeck is.

In this clip, Rich Brooks shares how to use TweetDeck to create groups of Twitterers. That way, you can filter out people you don’t want to miss from everybody else. I have a group called “real people” who are just folks I know in some capacity elsewhere. Rich also shows how TweetDeck’s search function works–I think this has changed somewhat in more recent versions, but it’s still a very handy function. I have a column set to show me all tweets with the word “stratepedia” in them. (Many people were using Twitter’s keyword search capability to keep up on the attacks in India, just to show you how potentially powerful this feature can be.)

Although the above screencast (like most others you’ll find about TweetDeck on YouTube) was done on a Mac, TweetDeck will also run on Windows XP or Vista. You’ll need to install Adobe AIR first, then TweetDeck. TweetDeck is free, but “donationware”–if you like it and use it, consider giving the developer a few bucks, like I plan to do this evening.

Is following human on Twitter becoming boring? Why not keep up with the space shuttle, a plant, or a horse? Check out 6 Unusual Entities that Tweet on Mashable for more. Have you found any offbeat Twitter feeds to follow? Share them with others in the comments below.

• Fight Spam With A Direct Message To Twitter
  Twitter users: Here's a way to help keep spammers from taking over Twitter (like they have with e-mail, SMS, etc.).
  (tags: twitter)

This afternoon, both my personal Twitter account and Stratepedia’s Twitter account became followed by another Twitter user. The usual warning signs were there:

• Our new follower’s username was “Britney” followed by a random number. Uh, yeah.
• Britney follows thousands of Twitter users, but you can count her followers on your fingers (and maybe your toes). Strike two.
• Britney’s posts are, uh, pretty direct, and always link to the same Tiny URL address. Sorry, Britney; you’re out.

In the past, all you could do was ignore “Britney” and her ilk, but no more. It’s pretty easy:

1. Sign into your Twitter account.
2. Go to @spam (that’s the “spam” account on Twitter) and follow it.

Now, when you receive a message from an obvious spammer such as our friend Britney above, just send a message to @spam, like:

@spam: @blah-blah-blah-suspicious-user-name-324234 is a spammer

The good folks who run Twitter will do the rest.

Reference: Fight Spam with a Direct Message to Twitter, TechCrunch, 10/6/08–this provides a few additional options for Twitter power users.

Many folks don’t realize it, but most of the services we provide–Depot, Dossier, Coaching Calendar, etc.–have accompanying Guidebooks. Each guidebook includes tutorials to help you get up and running with our stuff and make the most out of it in professional development and strategic instruction.

Of course, I’m never one to leave well enough alone, and when a new tool called ScreenSteps came along, making documenting procedures on a computer incredibly easy, Amber and I sat down, went through our materials, and essentially developed entirely new versions of our Guidebooks. And since Stratepedia.org just got a fresh coat of paint, we’re treating the new guidebooks in kind.

The result: It’s very pretty, and much easier to navigate. All guides are available in HTML format, for viewing in your web browser, as well as PDF format, for saving a local copy and/or printing (some of these are lengthy documents, though–I think the Coaching Calendar Guidebook is upwards of 40 or 50 pages–so think about a tree before printing, OK?).

Without further ado, here are a couple of screen shots:

First, the front page makes it simple to select the guide and format of your choice. Since these guides can can change, we include the dates each was last updated for your convenience.

Next up: Here’s a table of contents, HTML version. Select what you want to do, and click the tutorial for it.

Here’s an individual tutorial or lesson. We’ve gone back and broken steps into their simplest, most concrete forms to make it easy for newcomers to follow along.

Here’s a look at the PDF version of the same tutorial, using the Preview PDF viewer built into Mac OS X. Some nice features: Each PDF version also has a browsable table of contents (see the right-hand column here; this will show up along the left in Adobe Acrobat) and is keyword searchable.

Want to see a real, live preview?

We’ve got the new site up and running while we finish the remaining guides and final touches. You can see it for yourself, right now, but you have to visit our Twitter feed to get the address. Twitter is a great way to keep up with what’s going on at Stratepedia, so check it out and add us to the feeds you follow!

You now have yet another way to keep up-to-date with the latest news from Hello (the somewhat official name for this here blog). Follow Stratepedia on Twitter, and receive notifications whenever we post new articles here.

By the way, I’m using a free service called Twitterfeed to automate this. You can, too. It takes a few minutes to set up, particularly if you don’t have an OpenID account, but after that it’s smooth sailing.

A couple of weeks ago, Jim Knight began using Twitter as a communication tool for coaches. It’s gaining some traction, and many of you have begun following both me and Stratepedia.

If this is the first you’ve heard of Twitter, fear not–EDUCAUSE has released a brief overview of Twitter and its application to learning that’s as good as any introduction I could write. Better yet, visit Twitter, sign up for an account, and give it a try for yourself. Many people suggest that’s the only way to get what it can do.

I’m not a Twitter pro by any means–I only post a couple of times a day at the most, and, last I checked, I could still count my followers on my fingers and toes. But I’ve stumbled upon a few little things along the way to make using the service a bit less cumbersome.

1. Get a client. A Twitter client is a standalone program you download to your computer and configure to keep an eye on your Twitter account. This means you don’t have to go to the Twitter webpage each time you want to post or read others’ posts. I use a Mac client called Twitterific (the free, ad-supported one) on both my computer and my iPhone. More clients are available on Twitter’s downloads page, and even more can be found on the Twitter Fan Wiki. If you find a good one, tell us about it in the comments below (and/or in your Twitter stream).
2. Make replies trackable. This makes more sense in action than in words, so try this: Next time you’re replying to someone’s tweet (or just trying to get their attention), begin that tweet with the person’s username preceded by an @. For example, if you wanted to reply to something I said on Twitter, begin with @ruralocity. Then I can easily track things that are responses to something I posted by clicking my Replies tab. See “What are @replies?” on Twitter’s support site for more information, or just try it yourself by clicking the Reply icon associated with another tweet. One last thing–replies are not personal, private messages! They will show up alongside your tweets, so don’t say anything you wouldn’t say out loud in a crowd.
3. Don’t feel the need to follow everyone who follows you. Having a lot of Twitter followers is a badge of honor for some. Unfortunately, Twitter is also becoming yet another platform for spammers to do their dirty work. Both of these types of users will add you in the hopes that you’ll reciprocate. You can usually tell these types by looking at their following-to-follower ratios. My general rule of thumb? If someone’s tweets look interesting, I’ll follow them back. If I know someone in real life (or in some other, non-Twitter capacity) I’ll follow them back. How you handle it is your call.

If you can read this, you’re at the new and improved Stratepedia Blog. Hi!

More soon, but in the meantime I wanted to point out a couple of changes:

1. If you bookmarked something here you’ll have to bookmark it again. All of the old content has been moved over and is keyword searchable.
2. The categories got streamlined. Most stuff is now in Stratepedia News.
3. The podcast is gone, at least for now. We might revive it down the road, but if that happens it will be on its own site rather than mixed in here (which was kind of a chore, technically speaking).
4. You can now subscribe to our blog via e-mail! See the subscriptions page for more information.

Also, for system outage information, be sure to visit our new Twitter account: http://twiter.com/stratepedia. It dawned on me that it doesn’t do a whole lot of good if I post a message on this blog about our network being down. Twitter isn’t located on our server, or our network. If something’s down, and I know about it, it will be posted on the Twitter page. See the message in the green bar, right underneath the buffalo? That’s also coming from our Twitter page.

Like I said, we’ll be posting more (much more) here soon, but let me know if you have any questions in the meantime. Thanks!

Aaron