10 Simple Rules of Etiquette for Twitter

Posted in: Social Media, Twitter by Christian on August 1, 2009 | No Comments

Simple Criteria for me to follow and engage you:

1. Picture of yourself or likeness.

2. Where you live. iPhone/Google longtitude/latitude numbers don’t count. That makes more work for me. I’m not going to stalk you.

3. Give me a description. It can be work or non work related. What you are passionate about will come through in your tweets.

4. Don’t auto-dm me upon follow. It is like getting a form letter from my congress person. Their secretary wrote it and stamped used the signature stamp.

5. Half your tweets must be @replies or RTs that you share common beliefs in. If you’re just tweeting information you’re traditionally old. You still haven’t got the point of Twitter. This includes you major news sources (CNN, WSJ, et al). You are not exempt if you’re not listening.

6. Change your Twitter background. Doing so shows you are a creative person and we all are creative in our own way. You could draw stick figures and I would find it better than someone who doesn’t take the time to care about public perception.

7. DON’T YELL. It won’t get your point across anymore.

8. Don’t RT major news all the time for the sake of karma. Nine times out of ten everybody else I am following has RTed the same thing too. Common bonds = common interests = common knowledge.

9. Your tweets must make sense. It is a 140 characters. Make sure you still use the lessons taught to you by your HS grammar teacher. I’m not going to click on a tweet with a bunch of buzz words thrown together.

10. Be yourself. Living in a PC world takes a lot of work. It forces you to live within certain constrains. It limits honest, openness, and ultimately communication. This is where you have to know your audience and find the balance between being funny and sarcastic or being mean and hurtful.

Making Cents of It All – Part VI: Adapting

Posted in: Blog, Social Media by Christian on April 12, 2009 | No Comments

Another example of the double-edged sword is Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and other networking sites. It is great that we can now get back together with old friends even including some kids from high school we may not have gotten along with, but communicate with now because we are adults and hopefully more mature. Facebook also continues to stay popular because it is the middle ground between LinkedIn and Twitter in going after its niche market. This does bring a sense of community, although temporarily or longer by geo-location, but often too much time is being spent on social aspects and not doing one’s work that one was hired for therefore becoming counterproductive in some arenas. Also, too much of this can keep individuals and families away from being social with each other and neighbors. An old coworker told me how his teenage daughter would be on the Internet chatting with a friend while being on the phone with the same friend. This is great for marketing and advertising of communication services, but is not a substitute for human interaction face to face. Part of the reason we as a nation are getting fatter is we are sitting in front of the computer eating chemically enhanced fast food rather then eating healthy and exercising. People wonder why health care costs are going through the roof. Part of it is the baby boomer generation is living longer, but addiction to the computer and TV also contributes to being unhealthy in the long run. Read more…

Making Cents of It All – Part V: The Gatekeepers

Posted in: Blog, Social Media by Christian on April 8, 2009 | No Comments

I don’t want to be all “a twitter” (pun intended) about social media. I am a cautious optimist. To me Social Media is great in that it does break down the barriers of the gatekeepers of knowledge to get to the truth, but it also adds to the BS as the old saying goes, “Opinions are like assholes and everybody has one.” It makes the gray area more, well, gray. Read more…