She’s not the only one.  The Oklahoma Red Cross is using it to give alerts on shelters.  News stations are getting their warnings out there to more people.  Concerned friends and relatives (like me) can keep an eye on things when we are far away and not getting the kind of news coverage we would like from our own local stations.

When I was talking to mom she gave me a few reasons why she prefers Twitter to radio/tv for news updates.

• Pictures.  When the weather is bad her satellite goes out and she can’t see pictures of what is going on via the radio.
• Instant news.  She doesn’t have to wait for the radio announcer to get the reports from the reporters.  She’s getting rid of the “middleman” by following the reporters herself.
• First person news.  You can see reports from people on the scene and get a bigger picture view of the action.

No wonder newspapers are struggling.  It’s kind of hard to compete with instant coverage.

Where do you get your news?

I have been really focused this year on streamlining my branding and being more clear on what I represent and where I’m headed.  To see what other people thought I was all about, I started looking at the Twitter lists I was listed on.  It was a little eye opening.  At the beginning of the year, I was mainly on local lists.  Which was great, but I wanted to see more social media, crafting, design lists mentioning my name.  And so I worked on tweeting more about these things and slowly, but surely we are getting there.

Another way I like to use lists is by looking at lists that have been created by people I trust.  I like to find other interesting people online and follow them.  Listen to what they are saying.

How do you use Twitter Lists?  Do you like them?

So if you are on Twitter and are guilty of letting your account sit, here are a couple tips to get you going.

1. Make time to update. I don’t have a set twitter schedule, but I try to hop on atleast once a day.  It’s important to keep in touch with your contacts and keep the conversation going.
2. Make updating easy. Write about what is going on in your life.  {No, I don’t mean what you had for lunch– unless it’s interesting}.  Write about what you are experiencing.  Have you read a good book recently?  What made it so good?  Have you discovered a great news article?  Share it.  Have something funny to say?  Have at it.  Don’t think too hard about updating, just do it.
3. Use an application like Hootsuite or Seesmic to make twitter easier to navigate.  Here’s a couple tips on making twitter work for you and making it less of a time suck and using it productively.
4. Watch what others do. Are you still unsure how to use twitter?  See how other people are using it.  And you’ll soon be well on your way to making great contacts and opening doors.

For other articles to get you going on Twitter, go here.

What tips do you have for using Twitter?  How do you make your updates useful and interesting?

People tell me all the time that they couldn’t possible have an interesting blog, or twitter account.  Really?  I don’t think that’s true.  We all have something to say– atleast at one time or another.  It’s a matter of making note of it, developing the thought further in your mind and making time to write about it.  Here’s a little run down of how I try to keep content fresh on my twitter, facebook and blogs.

1. Write ideas down.  All my ideas seem to come to me when I’m falling asleep.  I have a notebook on my end table near my bed where I can write these ideas down.  Not only does it give me a release so I can fall asleep, but I wake up in the morning and review those thoughts.  Some get thrown out the window, but others I chew on for a bit.  I don’t thoughts or good ideas getting lost this way.  Also, it’s a great idea to have a phone with a notes appliation so you can do this same thing when you’re out and about.  Evernote is great for this and you will see trends that pop up overtime through your note taking.
2. Read other blogs and twitter feeds.  What are other people talking about?  Sometimes this will generate ideas, or even a response.  Just be sure to give credit where credit is due.
3. Get involved.  I love getting out and about in the city.  It’s a great way to meet people and have new conversations.  I make sure to take a couple minutes after a good event or meeting and jot down different ideas, or notes from the meeting.

I know this isn’t an all encompassing list of ways to keep your content fresh.  I would love to hear about how you keep the ideas coming and keeping them fresh.

{image credit here}

If you have multiple twitter accounts to manage, my best suggestion is to use an application to manage your twitter stream.  I go back and forth between Seesmic and Hootsuite.  I love Seesmic because I can add all of my twitter streams and it blends them into one.  So if I’m overlapping followers in these streams, I only see their tweet once.  I like Hootsuite for the other reasons. I like that it is an excellent web application.  It is also perfect if you have multiple twitter streams, and have a different voice for each stream.  This application doesn’t blend these into one stream.  As a side note, I use Twitterfon as my iphone application. 

If you are having trouble sifting through all your followers, I would also use an application to create custom columns {you can do this in both Hootsuite & Seesmic}.  I put my top 20 friends in one stream, a couple custom searches in another.  That way I am sure not to miss what my friends are saying, and I’m able to stay atop of the issues that are important to me.  Using search.twitter.com is also very helpful if you want to get instant results on what people are tweeting.  I use search twitter if I’m meeting with a potential client to see what others are saying.  I also use it if I’m researching a topic.  It’s been added as a search engine in my book, right next to google.

If you feel like you’re getting sucked into twitter, well, that may be okay, depending on your business.  If twitter is a main source of gaining potential clients and raising awareness about your services, you should be on twitter a lot. 

How do you manage your twitter usage?  What tips would you like to share?

The retweet (RT) is a powerful tool to get your information out to more people.  This button allows for quick and easy retweeting and is bound to help bring visitors to your site…assuming the content is worthy of a retweet.

Tweetmeme also offers listings of all the hottest links on twitter.  Want to see what people are tweeting about?  There is a well organized interface with all of the most popular retweets.  If you’ve just got a few minutes to spend messing around online, this is a good place to stop to find what’s hot at the moment.

Try it.  We think you’ll like it.

No longer.

Seesmic Web has launched and now we can access our information from any computer with internet access.  It doesn’t have all the capabilities of Seesmic Desktop from what we can tell.  We’re still working on how to get our multiple accounts registered and our settings how we like them.  But if it is anything like the desktop version, we’ll be happy.

RT- Retweet.  Use a RT when you like what someone has said, or would like to repeat it to your followers.  It gives credit where credit is due.  As you will see above Reporterssource is retweeting mysterymother.

# – this is called a hashtag.  It’s like a label.  It’s used on quite a few of the trending topics- see #iranelection and #notagoodlook.  It is also used for twitter parties so you can easily find what other people are saying that have joined the twitter party (using tweetgrid, or something similar).  An example of this would be #jourchat.  #jourchat is a group of journalists and PR personal that meet weekly at a set time.  The most popular hashtag you will see is #FollowFriday or #FF.  On Fridays, you can recommend people to follow- give their user handle, why we should follow them and place #FollowFriday in the tweet.

Hopefully these twitter tips are a big help and we hope to see you on twitter.  If you have any additional tips to share, please leave them in the comments.

In today’s post, I am going to discuss 5 basic principles of Twitter on the twitter dashboard. 

1. Followers: Everyone can see what I’m saying if they want to.  However, more than likely, it will be the people following me.  Just like Facebook, you can add friends, or follow people.  When you follow people, this adds their updates to your twitter stream.  And likewise if someone starts following you.
2. Mentions: Formerly known as @replies.  When you click on this on right hand side of your screen, you can see when others are mentioning your twitter name.  Usually people use this when they are directing a comment, or question towards someone in a public format.  See below for an example.

3.  Direct Messages: aka DMs.  This is used when you only want that person to see your message.  It still follows the 140 character rule, but is just not shown to the twitter nation.  DMs can only happen when two people are following each other.

4.  Search: You can search for anything and everything in this search bar.  Keywords, usernames, etc.  This may help you find people you can network with.  Here is another great search tool you can use for twitter.

5.  Trending Topics:  This gives you the top 10 topics that are being discussed on twitter at that very moment.  It’s a great news resource.  I can’t even tell you how many times I have found out pressing news stories, or random trends on twitter before I have ever heard it from a news source.

I hope this helps give you some of the stapes of twitter.  Stay tuned for more twitter helps.  I will be talking about different twitter lingo, and other basic tips in my next posts.