Twitter quickstart: Effective twittering in 5 minutes a week

If you’re new to Twitter, you want to quickly eliminate the five sure signs you’re a Twitter newbie. Here are some quick ways you can follow people, attract followers, and keep your feed regularly updated — all in less than five minutes a week.

Notes vs posted items

I’m having a little trouble with the difference between notes and posted items. I’m trying to set up my external blog (http://www.alexandrasamuel.com) to aggregate in my Facebook existence, and I’m not sure whether to aggregate Notes (pros: don’t have to post each note to my profile, so less work; cons: excludes bookmarks and photos) or Posted Items (pros: can include any content I want; con: I’m not sure I want to add every note/photo to my posted items.)

I’d love input from other folks on how they use posted items.

UPDATE: OK, I think the solution is to NEVER post a note. That way I can set my blog to aggregate both my Notes (i.e. my Facebook blog) and my Posted items (i.e. links/photos I’ve shared).

And I’m tagging “facebook” as a friend in this note, so I can see how my aggregator handles that inbound tag.

Tidying tags (and cars?)

When a story titled Confession: I’m a car slob popped up in the RSS feed I use to track who’s linking to me, I figured that some recent passenger had decided to out me to the world. Turns out that Beth Kanter has identified the correlation between untidy...

Business tunes into grassroots community

I’m just back from SXSW, where I was reminded that there are still a few people out there who are thinking about the Internet as a potential business opportunity rather than as a chance to reinvent democracy.

At the panel I was on — Remixing Business for a Convergent World — it seemed that what is really converging is how both business folks and political hacks are looking at the Net. Let’s take, for example, the question of how to make strategic use of blogs — a question that my fellow-panelist, Robert Scoble, addresses in his recent book Naked Conversations.

Thanks to blogs, businesses can no longer afford to ignore even their smallest customers. Traditional blue-chips are starting to recognize that their next p.r. crisis could be precipitated by a cranky shareholder or dissatisfied customer who blogs about the company. As for the latest generation of web start-ups — sites like Squidoo, Frappr, or LinkedIn — they’re not only sensitive to customer perceptions: their entire business models are based on user (i.e. customer) contributed value.

Once you start to see customers are value creators, rather than value consumers, a lot of business truths get turned upside-down. Take, for example, the idea that businesses are primarily accountable to their boards or shareholders. Does anyone out there think that the success of del.icio.us or Flickr depends more on Yahoo shareholders than on the users who are contributing bookmarks, photos, and software plug-ins?

If businesses find themselves suddenly accountable to their users, that kind of accountability is old news to both government and civil society organizations. Governments have always been primarily (if imperfectly) accountable to citizen-voters, and civil society organizations (whether community service groups or political advocacy organizations) have always been primarily accountable to their members and donors.

The net result is that it’s business that now needs to learn from civic and public organizations about how to enage at the grassroots level. It’s not like public and nonprofit organizations have all the answers — great examples of effective two-way member/voter engagement online are still rarer than the many examples of organizations that are still in “broadcast” mode — but at least there’s a decade of effort to look at.

For those of us who’ve been thinking about online democracy and grassroots engagement for something like that long, the rise in business interest should come as (mostly) good news. Sure, there’s more competition for public attention: efforts at getting voters to participate in policy discussion now have to compete with businesses offering free ipods in return for customer feedback.

But there’s also a rapidly expanding toolkit for grassroots community-building. Tools like Squidoo, Flickr, and del.icio.us offer entirely new ways of involving members and encouraging members to interact with one another. Just as important, the private sector’s growing embrace of customer “community” may help to build a broader culture of pervasive engagement.