1hr total w/slides tbd

Why social media is important and useful

• Why numbers are not important, involvement is

Who’s on twitter? A few examples per city.

Terminology and functions

• Using @
• @ to your account to see who is talking about/with you
• Direct messages
• # (in general and per market popular ones to note)
• RT
• Topic trending
• Favorites
• Each tweet is a url, forever, and searchable

Search.twitter.com

• to find mentions of site or book name
• to find other merchants, city specific events
• to find people

More ways of finding people to follow

• Using “Find People” to search for names
• Using email contact lists
• Seeing who other users follow and talk to
• Search # keywords for your city or topic

Gaining followers

• (I’ve already uploaded their work contact lists and the newsletter lists to an alias email to find people on Twitter per market)
• Responding to new followers with a hello message and “follow us on facebook [link]“
• What to do about spam accounts and baiting

Content

• sales at local stores
• events
• exclusive or breaking information
• Importance of looking like a human–occasional off topic tweets
• Using Bud Url or Bit.ly to shrink links

twitter.com/APStylebook

Whenever people are new to Twitter, they talk about how weird it is that people are following them. “I haven’t written anything!” or “I don’t even know who they are!” they cry, weirded out and slightly thrilled.

Anytime you are putting something on the internet, you have to assume people are reading it, and they have their own wacky and varied reasons for doing so. A formal follow on Twitter just lets you know who they are, and that’s a courtesy, not a threat. Sure, there’s someone (or a bandstand of someones) staring in your virtual window, but when they follow you it’s like a tap on the glass to let you know they’re there.

For people who aren’t bloggers, this is an understandably strange idea, but an important lesson. People put things on their Facebook and Flickr pages all the time that make me gasp. That drunken bday photo? Once it’s out there, you can’t assume that you control who sees it, and taking it down doesn’t prevent someone from copying and re-hosting it somewhere else. Using Twitter on your phone makes this even easier: beware the flippant tweet.

Anyone with a blog who tracks their visitors will tell you this: People find you by searching for strange things. At my work, a green living website, one of the consistent searches that leads to us is “naked families.” Why and how people find us that way, I have no idea. Here at my blog, “blackened tofu” and “first tattoo” are big trafficking words, and links from friends’ blogs send a lot of readers.

So you’ve started a blog or Twitter, and here they come, the mystery masses. They find you, and if they like you, they come back again and again, and eventually they let you know who they are. On a blog they leave a comment. On Twitter they send a follow notice or @ reply. You should be doing the same, as a courtesy and to build your own digital web of the people and information you want to catch.

I should note here that I’m disregarding people who drop by once and send a nasty message and trolls, who consistently leave jerky comments just to rile you up. You’ll know the difference by the thoughtfulness. Someone with a legitimate criticism may be worth engaging, otherwise, you’re free to ignore, delete comments, and block anyone.

Notifying someone that you’re there, or being notified, isn’t creepy, it’s conversational. Unless your Twitter account is locked (so you have to approve each follower), people are going to find you through searches or through someone else talking about you and retweeting (RT) your writing. If they don’t like you, they’ll drop you by unfollowing or no longer reading your blog, and that’s that. Vice versa, if you like them and keep reading, eventually it’s good form to send a little “hello, I’m here!” note.

Don’t be put off by the techy terminology, these are each examples of an opportunity to get to know someone. Since they’ve let you know they’re following you, you may as well take a look at what they’re talking about over in their mini online world. Check their Twitter, see if they have a blog, and listen in for a minute. Worst case scenario, maybe they’re this guy.

In that case, give a squee, be thankful you’re not a susceptible teen, and block him from viewing your tweets. Best case scenario? The person has similar interests, goals, or connections that you can benefit from. This happens more than you might expect, but if you’re new, you’ll have to be the proactive one who tracks down people you want to listen to.

On Twitter, I follow many of my favorite writers and NPR personalities, and the firsthand view into their work and lives has helped fuel my own writing career. On blogs, I click on the witty comments and find another blog, and behind that blog a whole new person and their people. My highlights so far include a photographer that makes me smile everyday, a cooking blog that changed my life with a bread recipe, and several artists whose work I bought for my home. Have a favorite newspaper reporter? Look for them on Twitter, find their blog, and voila, you’ve sent out a strand of your web to that person, and they’re that much more real to you.

Google can bring you a lot of search results, but the connections made between people who tweet, blog, and comment can’t be replicated any other way. It’s your own web, create it. Wave hello, and see who waves back.

All images: Flickr CC/Kelly Hau Photography and www.kellyhau.com.

But they were $140, plus shipping, boo. However! Weirdly, Gap to the rescue! The mega corp that is Gap/Old Navy/Banana Republic/Athleta now has a website called Piperlime that looks like an attempt to give Zappos a run for its money. And the Leia is on sale for $89.50, with free shipping.

Who has a new pair of kicks? That’s right.

They’re having a 30% off sale this week, and it looks like sales are frequent. Piperlime, check it out. Guys and kids, too.

Somewhat related: The CEO of Zappos has a really good blog. He nails why Twitter is good for business and people, and many of the comments are from presidents/founders/CEOs etc. of companies you’ll recognize. Friendly, enjoyable business blogs are hard to find. Well done, Tony Hsieh. I learned from it that all Zappos employees are given the same 4 week culture training, offered 2k to leave in those first 4 weeks (1% do), and are made to answer the customer service phones for 2 weeks. Every single employee, regardless of position, goes through that. Wow.

“Amazon seems to be stripping the sales figures and accompanying rankings from GLBTQ books, erotica, and romance novels, particularly those with what they term “adult content.”

FlickrCC/Murray?

They they got Amazon’s response:

“In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.”

Amazon ranking and sales being stripped means these books, as they say, don’t appear in best seller lists and major pages, which is obviously going to be murder on sales. Publishers Weekly cites Brokeback Mountain as one book that is now hidden in searches. Playboy books remain.

Smart Bitches posted at 11:22am this morning calling for readers to Google bomb the term “Amazon Rank.” I had never heard of Google bombing, but the premise is familiar to us all: Use a term enough times, and you’ll become the number one search result for that term. They also added an Urban Dictionary posting.

By 6:15 pm Smart Bitches was number one in results. By 9:13 Amazon had issued a few “we’re not sure, we’ll get back to you” type statements and then declared the whole thing a computer glych.

Twitter users, disemmenating information and links fast and furious like they do, came up with a host of responses, which you can search for with #amazonfail. (Hashes [#] are a way of creating a tag, or keyword, in Twitter. Go to the bottom of your Twitter page, click Search, and enter #amazonfail. You can also search for anything else of interest, such as #iPhone or # any major event.) I like this Amazon Fail logo and Dear Author post on how to contact Amazon.

As a lover of books, I’m always ticked to see censorship of any kind. Huzzah for a strong internet reaction.

Oh lordy, it’s a marriage of two things I love: Cats and Twitter (I am a Twitter expert, after all). Twitcat, I shall call it. Happy Friday, ya’ll.

It’s too bad you can’t use it to feed your cat. That’s what I need, a contraption that dumps food in the bowl when I tell it to because I’m out dancing late and forgot to feed the furballs. The obvious flaw here is that you’d have to know the status of your cat to begin with: In, or out. Unless it tells you which way the door swings, which would be handy. If I had an open cat door, though, I would have an apartment full of neighbor cats and racoons in no time.

On Gizmodo. Thanks Bjamin, for sending it my way.