Twitter is all the rage now; I wish I had a nickel for every time a client mentioned it. Succeeding in it is another matter, though, and at first it can be hellishly confusing.

When I first started, and was following dozens of people, I felt like I was in a busy sports bar during the Super Bowl. I remember thinking: I don’t know these people. I don’t know what they’re talking about. I must be in the wrong place.

It helps to know the rules and a little about the culture before you jump in. It’s not rocket science but it does take a little study and work.

1) Plan: First, think about why you’re even on Twitter.

Know what you want out of Twitter. Are you there for networking, building a brand, driving traffic to your blog? Determining this early will help guide your strategy and improve your odds.

2) Package yourself: First you need to pick out a Twitter ID. Consider your name first (I use @markivey); alternatively, you could use another name with your company, role or skills (example: @mediaphyte). You want something that will build your brand and/or illustrate your expertise.

And don’t skimp on your profile; make it sound engaging, and choose some nice wallpaper—this part is all about personal packaging (you can also customize your own wallpaper, using your company’s logo if you want). Study other Twitter examples because you need to get it right.

3) Follow the right people: Twitter is about following and being followed (more on connecting/conversing later) You can use the basic Twitter search or, better, one of the tools I recently reviewed like Twellow in my blog (www.ioncorporation.com/blog, date: Feb 6). These search engines can make life much easier for you by identifying the right people to follow.

Start with the influencers and industry experts in your industry. Find people with common interests and/or just people you want to track because they’re interesting. Check out some of the really big names here. Look for interesting directories and specialized lists; for instance, here’s 10 journalists worth following. And don’t forget your colleagues–you may have people all over your company tweeting. As one example, here’s a partial list of employees tweeting at Cisco.

4) Learn the lingo: Before you jump in and start tweeting, get up to speed on the lingo and abbreviations. Some common terms*:

• “tweet”: is a message.

• @ ID : A message with the @ sign preceeding the Twitter ID is a reply message; so if you want to send me a message, start with @markivey. (Note that your entire network can view this message).

• DM ID: Putting a DM in front of someone’s ID is a private message (you can only send private messages to people who follow you).

• RT: a retweet. If you find a post particularly interesting, you can copy and paste it and retweet it, as long as you give credit (tools like Tweetdeck have a RT button). (this is one of Twitter’s most interesting features, and how some Tweets go viral).

5) Manage efficiently: The last task is to download a “client” to manage your tweets and traffic. Twitter.com is ok for starters but you’ll soon want to move on to a better platform. These include clients like Twhirl and TwitterFox, which have built in search features, URL shorteners (which you’ll need) and nice interfaces to view and respond to your Tweets. Twitterfox is a Firefox extension, while Twirl is a downloaded application.

My favorite, though, is Tweetdeck.

What I love about Tweetdeck is you can arrange the people you follow into separate, manageable categories. I currently have four categories: “social media” (people who follow social media); “individuals” (business contacts, other influencers in other areas); Favorites; and “all.”

But you can set up categories for almost anything–influencers in your industry; friends/family/close contacts, sports/hobbies; special lists, like journalists or even by twitterers in your geographical area. Just add a new “pane” for each group.

You can also set up search features in separate categories to hunt for certain keywords, like your company name, personal ID or an issue or event (ex: China or World Series) . I have searches set up for “Twitter tools” and “Twitter tips.” The default search is search.twitter.com and Twitscoop, which reports on hot trends and keywords in Twitter.

One warning: Tweetdeck is a memory hog. It can also be addictive. Plan to set aside designated times, say 20 min. 3 times a day, to check it or you may wind up sitting there watching it for hours.

One way to become more efficient is to integrate Twitter into Outlook with a tool like Outwit. You can update your Twitter status and follow your friends without having to open any other applications.

Outwit allows you to schedule your Tweets to be delivered every minute to an hour, and dump them into a separate folder. This way you can check them at your leisure. You can also easily categorize them by name and save them, something you can’t do with Tweetdeck. One downside: your email box can quickly get overloaded (as if you need more email).

* Resources: there are hundreds of terms thrown around in the Twitter universe, some of the downright goofy. For instance, Twittish means “took skittish to twitter”. Check out this glossary for more.

note: you can follow me at http://twitter.com/markivey



Next: building a community with Twitter.

Social Networking’s popularity has now moved into the multi-level marketing industry.  This article seeks to explain why you as a home business owner should master the realm of social network and social media to attract new sponsoring to your business.

These two areas have in fact been interlinked for years however recently have merged online.  Today there are literally dozens of networking sites that business owners can use to meet and communicate with like-minded people on a global basis.  The remarkable benefit to this feature is that network marketers are no longer solely reliant on the “3-foot rule” and pitching friends and family.  The global nature of the internet opens up a whole new marketplace for people.

There are countless studies showing the continually increasing growth of online social networking.  MySpace currently gets over 50 million views a month and nearly 100 million people worldwide are using Social Networking sites collectively.  Perhaps some of this pervasiveness is due to the free or low-cost means of networking.  All it really requires is a genuine openness to tell your story and the desire to build mutually beneficial relationships.

When I first saw this, I didn’t think twice about it. As an MLM veteran and a successful online marketer, I dove in head first to experience first-hand how social networking could enhance my contacts and primary business’ team.  My status updates, marketing trainings, and article content have often virally spread throughout networking communities, which speaks to the power of this form of media.

Social Networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, Youtube etc has become some of the largest and busiest websites online.  The future looks very promising for those network marketers who effectively leverage these sites’ ability to connect people together and grow long-lasting online businesses.

In recent years, blogs and social media monitoring have become a fundamental part of the press office operation and many PR agencies’ bread and butter services.

As social networking has matured, companies need to engage proactively to ensure their brands are effectively supported.

Traditional media such as magazines, newspapers and TV channels have increasing numbers of journalist-written blogs as part of their online presence, meaning a top tier of blogs are seen as being just as influential in the media landscape as their e-zines and print media counterparts. There has also been an increase in the number of business-led social networks, business users of blogs and micro-blogging tools such as Twitter and Google-owned Jaiku, and multimedia social sites like Flickr.

However, a huge portion of the blogosphere and social media landscape is not professionally produced and individually these sites do not have huge audiences. Collectively though, these smaller outlets comprise as much as 99 per cent of the social media landscape and together form a powerful force that the PR industry is looking to harness. As the majority of blogs and social media sites contain personal content written in the first person, viral issues and stories can spread quickly. The sites connect people and when issues spread virally across social networks, they become big news for organisations that they affect. This is why tracking blog buzz across the whole of the web is critical for reporting on brand image, online coverage, and building a picture of customer perceptions.

An example of how effective a viral campaign can be, was when an online grass-roots campaign was formed on the social network Facebook. Protesting against an overdraft charge that the bank HSBC was imposing on recent graduate accounts, thousands of students joined forces online through a viral Facebook group which generated massive media attention, and forced a u-turn at HSBC. Within just a few weeks of the group launching, the bank scrapped the overdraft charges.

Over the last year, the fact that blogs impact a company’s brand image online has become more established. Marketing, PR and communications departments are increasingly exposed to the impact blogs have on a brand’s reputation, whether that’s negative coverage of a product or an online petition or a campaign across social networks. As this issue has gathered momentum, companies have realised that blogs and social media need to be actively managed not just monitored.

Some progressive brands are already doing this successfully. US retail bank Wells Fargo for example has a team dedicated to responding online to bloggers’ issues and complaints in order to increase positive sentiment around the brand online and reduce the amount of negativity that might emerge.

What caused the need to move from monitoring to engagement?  Early adopters have led the charge. And the masses have followed. We are seeing social media’s evolution in the business ecosystem move from early adopter to mass market status and web tactics are rapidly becoming better understood tactically and strategically as part of the PR mix. The challenge is to turn the opportunity into action.