By now virtually everyone knows that social networking needs to be a strategic part of marketing. Twitter is a quick and easy way to get started. You can get work leads, increase your customer base and enhance your reputation by better serving your existing customers, and connect with potential partners. But it’s not without its pitfalls.

When using any social media, the cardinal rule is: Don’t antagonize! Creating hostility is most decidedly NOT the way to brand yourself or market your services or products.

Below is a list of the most common practices that I see your followers may find objectionable:

1. Spamming

You may think that you’re not spamming, but if marketing is all you ever think about, you just might be perceived as a spammer. Even if your ultimate goal in using Twitter is to promote your business, you’ve got to shift your attitude. Stop marketing, stop pitching, stop selling. Customers want to interact with you and with each other—they don’t want to be sold. Instead, think about how you can be part of the community and benefit others. Refrain from tweeting too much about your company and the services you offer.

2. Using an inappropriate photo

I’m sure you already know that you must have a photo on your Twitter site or no one will take you seriously. It’s best to put up a picture of yourself rather than your pets or something abstract. (I confess that I have a picture of my cat on my Twitter site, but I’m promoting my cats, not myself.) Use a professionally taken, close-up photograph of yourself. I see too many pictures where I can barely make out the person. Is it a bird? A horse? A human?

You can also use your company logo as the icon instead of a personal photo if that’s what you’re promoting. If you want to add a personal touch, you can also put a picture of yourself on the sidebar. In fact, that’s a prime piece of real estate for including more details about yourself or your company.

For some examples of highly successful Twitterers, see: http://twitter.com/savvyauntie (about 12,300 followers) and http://twitter.com/chrisbrogan (some 123,233 followers).

3. Sending ho-hum tweets.

You don’t have to write scintillating prose, but you do want to your tweets to be interesting, fun, or valuable to your clients. If your tweets are consistently boring, people will tune you out.

How you tweet depends on whether you’re representing your company or trying to brand yourself. Either way, do use a distinctive voice. With Twitter, you can sound casual, even a bit playful or offbeat. But remember, even if your tweets sound light and spontaneous, don’t forget that anyone can read them.

4. Sending mostly one-way “broadcast” tweets.

Remember that you’re supposed to be engaging in conversations. I remember one amusing spoof video clip on Twitter that made the rounds a few years ago. It showed a young man traipsing up and down the streets yelling out his thoughts and opinions about everything, while completely ignoring everyone around him. It was amusing in that it’s exactly how some people behave on Twitter. Don’t be like him; don’t add to the noise. Listen to the conversations around you. See what people are interested in. Be a resource. Try to answer some questions in your field of expertise. Offer tips, useful information, and third-party links.

That doesn’t mean you can’t tweet promotions or information about your organization. You just have to make sure that you have a good mixture of tweets. Include occasional personal updates as well. Revealing little glimpses of yourself  helps people feel connected and authenticity to your voice.

5. Using the default Twitter background.

So this isn’t a cardinal sin. But surely you can do better than that. An extremely successful consultant I know uses one of the free backgrounds that Twitter offers. That’s enough to get you started. But there are so many options out there, why settle for that? Give your site a little pizzazz by customizing it. You can use free resources like Twitbacks.com and www.twitdom.com. Others, like www.twitterbackgrounds.com offer both free and custom-designed backgrounds.

I just finished reading an interesting post on Copyblogger by Sonia Simone. I love people who aren’t afraid to question the status quo or express an opposing viewpoint to acceptable practices. I love it even when I don’t agree with them, because it keeps the conversation going, ensures we don’t get complacent, and pushes us to explore all the avenues.

The mantra in social media is to invite feedback, engage in conversation. Sonia isn’t advocating ignoring comments. Rather, she suggests we should:

• Focus on where we want to go
• Develop a “red velvet rope policy”
• Ask ourselves “Is this person my customer?” whenever we receive a negative remark.

It’s an article worth the read.

“Are You Getting Dangerous Feedback from Your Readers and Prospects”

As my term as president of Women in Consulting comes to an end this week, I find myself reflecting on all the incredible experiences I’ve had throughout the last two years.

We celebrated our 10th anniversary in 2008 with not only a gala event, but a new look & feel for our website and a new blog. In 2009, we expanded our social media presence to include LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

We expanded the reach of our organization, with strong and vibrant satellite groups in San Francisco, the East Bay and North Bay/Marin, as well as the South Bay and Peninsula.

We created a mentoring program and offered workshops to help consultants grow profitable businesses.

We expanded our Leaders Network to provide a venue for seasoned consultants to meet and exchange thoughts and ideas with their peers.

We expanded our profile in the community–partnering with a wide variety of organizations and associations, including the Silicon Valley American Marketing Association, the Association for Strategic Alliance Professionals (ASAP), FountainBlue, Astia, IMC NorCal, NorCAL BMA, and others.

We provided benefits to our community from groups like People OntheGo, SD Forum, Cubes & Crayons, Vertical Response, MarketingProfs, Egnite, WeMeUs, Zoomerang, and PR Newswire. And we continued our partnership with Million Dollar Consultant Alan Weiss and the Society for the Advancement of Consulting.

We held silent auctions to benefit Girls for a Change and collected donations for the Georgia Travis Center in San Jose.

Not only did we offer a top-notch set of outstanding speakers for monthly programs, but we launched teleseminar and webinar programs as well.

We continued to offer outstanding value to members and affiliates through our renowned mail list and other resources.

In fact, through the worst recession in nearly a century, we grew our community to be nearly 500 strong–with our ranks of full members swelling by nearly 40% this year.

And we did all this as an entirely volunteer run organization, with over 100 consultants taking on pro bono consulting roles for WIC.

Why, in a time when many organizations are struggling or even closing their doors, is WIC thriving? Because in addition to everything I’ve already mentioned, one of the most important things WIC provides is a strong, collaborative community–a place where consultants can come to learn as well as to socialize, to build their businesses as well as to connect with colleagues, to share experiences and develop referrals, to grow as individuals as well as part of a bigger whole.

For all of these reasons I feel extremely lucky to have had the privilege of guiding this organization over the last two years. And I feel extremely confident in turning over the reigns to the extremely capable and passionate Avery Horzewski to take WIC to the next level.

Thank you to all of you who are a part of WIC. WIC is community and I am grateful for the opportunity to work with each and every one of you. Here’s to more wonderful WIC happenings in 2010 and beyond!

I’ve been tweeting for about five months now and loving it. It’s become a regular part of my day and work life and I’ve gained boatloads of insight, access to information and more, which I wrote about earlier.

I’ve noticed a somewhat disturbing trend in some tweeting though, something that brings me back to Business Communications 101 with a heaping dose of Internet Etiquette 101: you are your own PR team, and anything you put on The Internets can and will come back to haunt you. Or at the very least, could leave your followers with a less than golden impression.

Case in point: I’d been following a certain tweeter’s posts since Day 1 of signing up for Twitter. This person has a rather ascerbic style which I didn’t particularly like, but I found enough of her tweets interesting (at first) that I decided to keep her on my follow list.

Over time, what seemed at first to be a slightly sharp personality felt more and more like negativity. When I tweeted about a very fun evening I’d had out (a somewhat rare personal tweet for me, I keep it strictly business, for the most part), she promptly tweeted back with a cutting remark, trashing what I’d tweeted about. It was then I decided that was enough.

Oversensitive? I don’t think so. Had it only been that one tweet, I’d agree with anyone who said that. But it wasn’t. It was all of her tweets. Rarely a positive or helpful thing did she have to say. A lot of griping though. A LOT of griping.

I should mention that — thanks to TweetDeck, a must-have app for Twitter lovers — I had even moved her out of my ‘favorites’ in order to get less exposure. She was a prolific tweeter, so the influx of bad vibes was pretty heavy. Nonetheless, I understand the power of networking and there were aspects of her presence in my circle that I valued.

On the day she totally trashed my tweet however… she tipped the scales and I decided that her value wasn’t worth all the negativity I had to wade through to get to the good stuff. Did she mean it that way? Was it something I’d misunderstood? Well, at this point, it didn’t really matter because my overall perception of her was that she was not someone I wanted to communicate with. Life is short, and all that.

I removed her from my network. And proactively searched for lots of other tweeters. And found so many, with such useful, funny, insightful and enthusiastic things to say. And I haven’t looked back. And tweeting is fun and worthwhile again.

What is particularly unfortunate for this consultant is that she is someone I would have potentially hired. She is well-respected, talented and probably does her job very well. But what would working with her really be like? What if something went wrong on the project? Her overall down attitude gave me a lot of insight into how she really ticked, and I didn’t like what I saw. So not only did she lose a follower… she lost future jobs.

With the rise of social media tools such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc., I am seeing what I call the ‘Do All — Tell All’ mentality. Because there is some gray area between personal and business usage of social media tools, I believe there is a danger of forgetting the basics of good business communication. If we’re not careful, it can be really easy to let a little loose and say and do things we wouldn’t have dreamed of doing before Social Media gained the foothold it has firmly wedged for itself in the world of marketing.

So… be careful, Tweeps. Keep it positive, informative and helpful most of the time. Occasional bellyaching is okay (and can be good, if done well), but if the majority of your posts in a 24 period (or longer) are negative in tone, you might want to take a little break and realign your tweets with a different outlook that presents your most attractive face to the public at large. You never know who might be paying attention.

There’s been a lot of press in the last few months about ‘Twitter Quitters’ and the 60% of users that stop tweeting after about a month. And now, there appears to be some indication that Twitter usage has flatlined, although time spent on Twitter in the last year has grown a whopping 3712%.

A lot of people have tried Twitter and a lot still don’t get it. Many perceive it still as way to broadcast what you had for lunch or simply to brag about your latest achievement — but those of us who’ve stuck with it are probably in there for the long term. As this wise blogger posted, it takes time to get it. (Be sure to read the comments in that blog post too; you’ll get a good sense of the various reactions to Twitter.)

Me? I’m sticking with it, definitely. I had a few ‘hmmm…’ moments when starting out, but I think this is to be expected with any new communication medium. Perhaps in our ‘more now’ society, and the ease of so many Internet-related applications and tools, we are expecting it to be easier. But as with many endeavors, sticking with it can have some real advantages.

Like any networking, Twitter is not an immediate pay-off. Just as you wouldn’t walk into any networking meeting and expect to get business (although it can happen), you shouldn’t tweet expecting to garner any immediate ROI, either. Like any good networking, you’ll need to spend time (and definitely more than a month) growing and cultivating your following/follower list to start to see the real value.

As Hutch Carpenter points out in his post, it’s about finding your stride on Twitter. Some get it immediately, for others it takes more time. If you’re going to try tweeting, I recommend committing for at least 3 months. Even if you think you have no idea what to say, at least start following others and read along until you feel comfortable enough to start tweeting. It really does take time and I think chances are high that as a business user, you’re going to see benefit within that 3 month period.

Following is what I’m getting out of Twitter already, in the short time that I’ve been tweeting. And by the way, I don’t tweet everyday, and I don’t tweet a lot. A good day for me is probably somewhere between 5-10 tweets, sometimes a lot less. And sometimes, nothing at all. I think it will increase in the future, but for now, I’ve taken the pressure off of myself to be a ‘power tweeter’ and am enjoying what I’m getting from Twitter for now — which is definitely enough to keep me coming back.

Accessibility
An amazing number of high-level and accomplished people are on Twitter already. And most likely, at least a few of them are in your field of work. To have access to their daily thoughts, interests, rants and raves is exciting, informative and instructive all at once. Also good: the potential to connect very genuinely with these people, and the possibilities that lie therein. You can tweet them directly, and they just might answer back. Probably more so than if you sent them an email.

Information
Staying ahead of the curve is a challenge no matter what your field of expertise. And key to staying ahead is information. In the three months I’ve been on Twitter and started following people whose tweets I like and work I respect, I have gained access to a plethora of sites, articles and general information (both business and personal) that I may not ever have stumbled across before. It can be overwhelming, but once you get used to picking and choosing what to pay attention to, it’s actually wonderful to have so much information coming effortlessly to your desktop every day. And if you’re an info/news junkie, you’ll love it.

Speed
I can’t think of a faster way to disseminate or have access to information these days. The immediacy of Twitter is key to its success and there have been numerous instances of Twitter users coming to the rescue in one way or another for fellow tweeters.

Insight
Tweeting is a great way to get some insight and perspective into the personalities of the people you’re following. Some tweeters keep it strictly business, but many do not. And while it’s not the same as working together (virtually or otherwise), it can definitely give you information to consider as you’re deciding who you’d like to join you on a project — or not (!)

Antidote to Isolation
As a consultant, you may already be far too familiar with this one: isolation. After 11 years of running my own business, it’s what I dislike the most about being self-employed. Networking is nice, but sometimes hard to get because of distance, time or both. Twitter is no replacement for human interaction, but it’s not bad. I already feel a good deal less isolated and know that with a small amount of effort on my part, I can immediately reach out to a large community of fellow designers (and interesting non-designers as well) with my questions, comments and general instinct to share info and neat things I run across. It’s as fun as it is informative.

I orginally thought tweeting would only work for certain personality types. But now I see it as an indispensable business tool that any consultant would be wise to seriously consider and include in their arsenal of brand-building and self-promotion. You may not love Twitter, and you may not end up being a heavy user. But chances are that if you understand the power of networking and viral marketing, you’re going to ‘get it’ immediately. For the small amount of effort it takes to be on Twitter, the rewards are pretty significant.

Happy tweeting! And be sure to leave a comment about your Twitter experiences — both good and bad.

If you’ve read my previous recap/intro to Twitter, and I’ve got your attention — read on, this post will help you quickly get up to speed.

UI design of social media tools is a point of hot contention. Both Twitter and Facebook have been heavily criticized for the lack of clarity and consistency in their applications. Facebook recently embarked on a redesign that generated a firestorm of negative feedback from loyal users, and Twitter — in addition to have bandwidth issues that can cause the site to crash and leave those only using the twitter.com UI stranded — is notorious for having a confusing, ever-changing UI that has generated a plethora of other tweeting tools that many prefer to the actual Twitter site. The author includes herself in that latter group, btw.

What I find so interesting and fascinating is that these companies could have such serious UI/design issues and yet see exponential growth and popularity. What that says to me is: they are definitely on to something and social media is most likely here to stay. It may morph in the months and years to come, but I don’t think we’re going to see it die any time soon. Just today, Oprah signed up for her Twitter account. If that isn’t an indication of where Twitter is going, I don’t know what is.

So… while these apps were supposedly designed to be low-calorie and user-friendly, they can be confusing. Reading up on a few tips and tutorials before you jump in can get you tweeting better and faster without the frustration that sometimes leaves people scratching their heads over the Twitter/social media phenomenon. Following is what I’ve learned in my own Twitter experience in the last week or so, plus tips I’ve picked up from other Twitter users. I’ll cap this post off with the Mother of All Twitter Tutorials that Nancy Friedman kindly tweeted to me a few days back.

Twitter Tips and Tutorials

I’ve got my Twitter account, now what do I do? There are a number of basic features that you should immediately set up to give yourself (or your company) a good Twitter presence. Once you’ve created your account, hop over to ‘Settings’ and do the following:

1/ Add your name or company name to your profile. This is one of the first things users will see under your profile, so you want it to be correct. You may need to decide whether you are going to be tweeting under personal or company name. In my case, I opted to do a hybrid, using my company name in my twitter handle (elevatainc) and my personal name (Rachel Cary) in the ‘Name’ field.

2/ Add your twitter handle under ‘Username’. Correct me if I’m wrong, someone, but I believe that this field is auto-populated once you set up your Twitter account. From what I know of databases, it would certainly make sense to have it so.

3/ Add or change your email address. I think this field is also auto-populated but it can be changed/updated. Caution when updating email addresses: I initially set up several ‘elevata’ accounts and inadvertently got the email addresses mixed up. It took Twitter a while to get that sorted out. If possible, decide what info you’re going to use before sign-up and then stick with it.

4/ Time Zone: self-explanatory.

5/ Add your web or blog site url. Bet you wish you had that web site live now, huh? [wink] Consider this more incentive to get serious with your online presence.

6/ Add your bio. Note: here’s an area where the Twitter UI is confusing. If you enter 160 characters as instructed, your info will be cut off after around the 100th character or so. Keep it under 100 and everyone will see it. Also, very important: make this bio keyword rich. It will be used to find you in the future under Twitter searches.

7/ Add your location: self-explanatory.

8/ Choose your language (defaults to English.)

9/ Save your work and bam!, you’re already several steps ahead.

10/ Oops — don’t forget to add your picture or company logo/icon. Jump over to ‘Picture’ and upload an image under 700k (jpg, gif, png formats only) and Twitter will do the rest for you.

11/ Click ‘Save’ again and now you’re cookin’ with gasoline, as they say.

When I first started with Twitter, I thought it might be fun to brand my Twitter profile. It’s relatively easy to do and Twitter gives you 12 background images that you can use or play with using their color picker tools. You can also upload your own background image. Keep in mind it will need to tile and should be under 800k.

Since I quickly learned that I much preferred other Twitter apps to the Twitter UI, I decided to forgo this route. But if you want to have some fun with design and color, or you actually prefer the Twitter UI, then you should check on the ‘Design’ tab and play with the tools they have there. Pretty user friendly and the color picker tool in particular is a great idea as it allows you to create variations on the 12 design themes they provide.

If you’re really into decking out your Twitter profile, you might want to check out PimpMyTwitter for some low cost, custom design.

Okay, I’ve set up profile… now what? Now you need to find people you’re interested in following. Don’t be as concerned with who is following you to start. That will come in time. Often, those who you’ve chosen to follow will follow you back, particularly if you share similar interests.

You can start by using the ‘Find People’ feature on the Twitter site to look for names of people you know, or people you’d like to know and follow. Once you’ve exhausted that, use the Twitter Search tool to search for people again. You can also use Twitter Search to search for terms, such as ‘marketing manager’. You might be amazed to see who is on Twitter. More people/companies are joining every day, and you might just find that C-level executive and get some great insight into what they’re thinking and doing, as well as the opportunity to make contact.

Twellow is another fairly robust Twitter search tool that allows you to search by name or topic. You won’t be found on Twellow unless you sign up with them, but you search to your heart’s content without signing up.

Got my profile, got my following… what do I tweet about? This is the crucial element of Twitter and where many users find themselves doing a ‘huh?’ There’s already a lot of bad tweeting out there, so learn to Tweet the right way before picking up bad habits. If you’re thinking ‘but nobody cares what I had for lunch…’, um, you’re right, they don’t. So don’t break that rule. In general, you should keep tweets short, sweet and honest. Don’t toot your own horn too much, although calling attention to significant updates/accomplishments is okay. Remember that Twitter is more immediate and more permanent than The Internets. Avoid profanity and nothing confidential, of course. Also annoying: tweeting one-on-one conversations that should be left to Direct Messaging or IMs. There are more tips on how to tweet well in the WebDesign Depot link referenced at the top and bottom of this post.

I’ll post next on Twitter Apps. Personally, I’ve already switched to using TweetDeck for my tweeting and I highly recommend. But there are others, as well as other apps that you can use to enhance your Twitter experience. If you’re already a Twitter junkie and need a fix, be sure to check out the following wonderful post on Twitter. Chock full of Twitter info, including a glossary of terms and an extensive list of Twitter apps to check out: Webdesigner Depot’s Ultimate Guide for Everything Twitter. Oh, and if you’ve got any great Twitter nuggets to share, please leave a comment or tweet me: elevatainc.

Marketing Vox summarizes a social media study by Michael Stelnzer that set out to understand how and why marketers are using social media to grow and promote their businesses. The study found that Twitter, blogs, LinkedIn, and Facebook — in that order — are the top four social media tools used by marketers.

Given that the study (”How Marketers Are Using Social Media to Grow Their Businesses” PDF) “began with a Twitter post, which was then re-posted by users onto Facebook and blogs,” it’s not surprising that Twitter placed high (approximately 2,500 marketers were sent an email asking them to take the survey as well). 

Other stats about the survey:

• Survey closed after 10 days with 880 respondents participating
• 70% of the participants were small business owners
• 26% of the participants were employees working at a company
• 78.1% of the participants were between 30 – 59 years of age
• 56% of the participants were female, and 44% of them were male

Read “Marketers’ Top Social Media: Twitter, Blogs, LinkedIn, Facebook“

This is the second part of my recap of the EBWIBR Social Media Luncheon that I attended on Friday, April 3rd. I learned quite a bit in the two presentations given by Nancy Friedman of WordWorking and Kelly Parkinson of Copylicious. It was obvious both presenters had far more to say about Twitter and LinkedIn than we had time for, and I look forward to hearing these women speak in the future about Social Media. In the meantime, here’s a recap of Kelly’s presentation which focused on using one of LinkedIn’s powerful networking tools: InMails.

If you’re like me, you’ve set up your LinkedIn profile and you’ve got a nice set of contacts. Perhaps you’ve sent out recommendation requests and got those set up as well. Maybe you’ve joined a few LI groups. And then you let your account sit there. What a lot of people either don’t realize or aren’t taking advantage of is that LinkedIn can be a great social media tool as well.

Let’s talk results first: when Kelly tried InMail (initially as sort of an ‘experiment’, and not expecting huge results), she had a 41% response rate and 6 new clients. If that doesn’t make you sit up and take notice in this economy, I don’t know what will. I should note that I would like to know how many InMails Kelly sent because while that’s a great response, InMails do cost money. (And Kelly if you read this, please comment if you can.) But as the saying goes, sometimes you’ve got to spend a little money to make a little money.

What is InMail? InMails are a proprietary LinkedIn networking tool. It is a paid service and may seem pricey at first: $10 a pop. However, there’s an enticing aspect to this and for some, a significant upside: no cold calling. Now, if you’ve been in business for a while, you probably don’t do a lot of cold calling, or only as your last resort. But if you are new to the game (as Kelly was at the time), or in a, ahem, down economy, you might find it necessary to pick up that telephone. Before you break out in a cold sweat and do that however, consider InMails. Quick, easy, non-invasive and here’s a bonus: if they’re not opened, you get a 100% refund on the InMail and you can use it to send to someone else. You only pay for what actually gets opened. For me, that softens the blow of the $10 price tag a bit.

Also, keep in mind that you won’t be blasting to hundreds of people at a time. One of the myths about using LinkedIn that Kelly pointed out is that being a ‘power user’ is not necessarily the best way to go about it. Are you really going to have any meaningful contact or interchange with 8000 connections? Chances are more likely that if you cultivate a smaller but highly relevant set of contacts and selectively add to them when doing InMails, you’re chances of making contacts that actually go somewhere are much higher.

How do I use InMails? If you don’t have a LinkedIn account, you’ll need to get that first. And honestly, if you’re just getting started on LI, you’ll probably want to explore the basic features before you jump into InMails. But in the event you’re ready to jump in, or have been on LI for a while now, sending InMails is not rocket science. Basically you would want to do a keyword search on LinkedIn to find the people you’d like to contact. In Kelly’s case, she use ‘marketing manager cleantech’ as this was where she wanted to focus her work. Hint: as in any marketing outreach program, targeted InMails will probably get you a much higher response rate. Use the very user-friendly LinkedIn UI to set up the emails, compose your message and hit ‘Send.’ Easy as that.

What should I say in my InMail? Keep it short and suggest a brief initial contact: ‘Let’s talk for 15 minutes on x/x/2009, etc.’ Nobody likes to be sold heavily on the phone, or even in person, right? Bless your email outreaches with the same brevity and you’re more likely to get a response.

Another great tip from Kelly: as you’re going to send your InMails (and I think this works for almost any outreach marketing you do) remember that you are the expert and they need you. Approach this kind of outreach with the attitude of ‘why, of course you want to hear from me, because I can really help you.’ This takes the pressure off of ‘making that sale’ and comes from a more honest, non-aggressive and, I believe, successful position than what we sometimes are taught as ‘good’ sales techniques.

I haven’t tried InMails yet, but I intend to do so in the future. I’ll report back here with what success I have, if any, and I hope to hear from any of you out there on The Internets who have also tried InMails and what your experience has been.

In future posts, I’ll be exploring other networking features of LinkedIn and how to really work your profile. For now, I’ll be focusing on Twitter though as I’ve only begun to scratch the surface there.

As one of WIC’s Social Media Co-Chairs, I’ve been keeping my eye open for speaking events from users of social media. I was particularly interested in users that were perhaps not ‘power users’, or social media experts, but users that were a little more like you and I. Or perhaps, more like we’d like to be.

Last week I found just the thing: EBWIBR’s monthly luncheon. EBWIBR (East Bay Women In Business Roundtable) is a division of the Oakland Chamber of Commerce and this event was a luncheon which featured copywriters Nancy Friedman (Wordworking.com) and Kelly Parkinson (Copylicious.com) who spoke on Twitter and LinkedIn, respectively. The event was well attended (sold out) and I found the speakers to be both engaging and very informative, with eye-opening personal experiences when it comes to leveraging social media. I saw several women in the room pulling out their laptops and cellphones to sign up for Twitter as I left. I left more convinced than ever that the ‘Twitter Train’ has left the station and that working your LinkedIn connections is a tool too many of us are leaving untapped.

Following is a recap of my notes from the meeting on Twitter (thank you, Nancy!) as well as a few other tips and observations I’ve picked up in the last few weeks since I’ve started researching social media B2B usage and viability. I’ll cover what I learned on LinkedIn from Kelly in my next post.

What is Twitter? Twitter is not a web site or a place. It is a moving sidewalk, a cocktail party. It’s a whole new way to talk to your clients and colleagues. It’s organic, it’s real and it’s lightening fast and usage is growing daily. Just recently, Twitter searches have overtaken Google searches. That is a significant milestone.

How do I sign up? Getting on board takes about the time it would take to create an email account (faster, depending on what client you’re using.) Twitter is permission-free. You can follow anyone you want (and there are a LOT of interesting people already on Twitter) and anyone can follow you. Don’t worry though, you can also block anyone from following you.

How do I use Twitter? Once you sign up, you’ll be directed to your Twitter account page with the question ‘What are you doing?’ and a field to enter your answer to that question. Note: do not feel obligated to confine your posts to answer that question alone; it’s no longer just about what you’re doing (keep reading.) You can post from your desktop, iPhone or Blackberry, etc. Posts are confined to 140 characters each (hello, copyediting and tinyurl.com) and as Nancy pointed out, confining oneself to 140 characters to communicate a thought, idea or comment is an excellent writing exercise. You should count on posting at least 5x/day to start. If that sounds overwhelming, try just a few a day to start and take it from there. Don’t overthink your posts. Be genuine and talk about what interests you or your current issues/needs. You may be surprised who is searching on the same terms you are writing about, and who will show up (sometimes very quickly) in your ‘Follower’ list once you start posting.

Tweeting comes more naturally to some people than others (more on that later), use it at your own pace and see what happens. Avoid sales pitches and tooting your horn; this isn’t the place for it. Ideally, you’d want other people to be tweeting about you. You can, however, use Twitter to ask questions, put out feelers for work you’d like to do, put out feelers for contractors or employees, talk to experts (people you might normally have a hard time reaching), publicize an event, post your thoughts/comments and respond to other Tweets. The point is to generate a cocktail-like feed of comments between you and everyone else at the ‘party.’ Nancy had another wonderful term for what happens on Twitter: “ambient intimacy.” She also alluded to it as the ‘well of water that exists before you turn on the tap’ which I thought summed up the Twitter phenomena very nicely.

How do I get started once I sign up? Sign up and start tweeting. Search for people you know who might be on Twitter. Search for people you don’t know but would like to know and start following them. Most people will not block you and you could soon find yourself tapped into a rich network of information to which you’ve never had access. Ask questions, tell your Twitter community what you need, and be surprised at how quickly you may get answers.

Nancy had a great tip on getting started: simply lurk and follow other Tweeters for a while to see how it’s done. Once you’ve gained some comfortableness and confidence, you can start your own posts. You may find yourself joining the conversation(s) sooner than you think!

Why should I sign up? I can think of at least 2 reasons why you should sign up, even if you’re not ready to start tweeting right away: 1/Branding: grab your personal or business name handle (or both) before someone else (or your competition) does. Kind of like getting your url before someone else does. 2/Twitter appears to be taking off. Even if usage flattens out at some point, it’s probably wiser to get on board sooner rather than later, especially if you work in the fields of Marketing, Design, Copywriting, PR, Web Development, etc.

Will I like it? You won’t know until you try. Approach Twitter (and all social media) with a playful, experimental, creative attitude. These are relatively new communication mediums and you might feel out of your comfort zone initially. Many Twitter users report becoming addicted one they start, however.

If you are a news junkie, you will most likely love Twitter. If you are a person who is overwhelmed by new information, no matter how small, you will probably need to go slowly and it may require some adjustment. Also, you may not like it and that’s okay too. There are many forms of social media networks these days; the idea is to find the one you like and you most likely will incorporate it naturally into your business communication.

Can I brand my Twitter page? Yes, you can! But that’s a post unto itself, so I’ll cover that in subsequent Twitter blog posts. I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of using this wonderful new tool.

Feel free to look for me on Twitter, my handle is elevatainc. I look forward to seeing many of you there soon!

P.S. I updated my Twitter account last night and I’ve got 4 new followers in the last 24 hours. How’s that for fast networking?

As the author of “How to Monitor Online Conversations” (Dawn Foster, Web Worker Daily) points out, “Keeping up with online conversations can be a daunting task.” That’s why I like Dawn’s article. It’s short-and-sweet with a few manageable recommendations for readers to follow — perfect for someone just starting out and not sure how to harness the plethora of information that’s available.