r u l y

If you are over the age of 25, Twitter is most likely a complete mystery. You may have heard bits and pieces about Twitter and figure that it has something to do with sending messages with lots of acronyms and juvenile abbreviations like:

r u organized? Find gr8 tips 2 help u @ beruly.com.

I have to admit that I had no interest in using Twitter and figured it just wasn’t a medium that fit my strengths well. Then I read an article in a business publication recommending that a good way to gauge a prospective business partner is to read the last couple of tweets the person wrote, since the content is both brief and freshly produced. Reluctantly, I set up a Twitter account.

What on earth is Twitter? How do you use it and not look ridiculous? Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein have written a concise but thought-provoking book, called simply, The Twitter Book, to help the Twitter novice understand the Twitter universe. The book is written much the way Twitter functions with short paragraphs of text on the right-hand pages combined with example Tweets on the left-hand pages. The book doesn’t go into great detail on any one topic but rather gives you a quick reference on a variety of ways to use Twitter.

I really wish I would have read The Twitter Book before I set up my own Twitter account as I am now painfully aware of numerous mistakes I have made (and see other Twitterers making as well).

Backing up for just a minute, though. If you still have no idea what Twitter is, allow me to give a very brief Twitter-like explanation:

What are you doing? 140 characters. 5 minutes of fame.

Twitter is a social network where people joining the network communicate using only 140 characters or less (a limit imposed by cell phone text messaging systems). The messages are stream of consciousness writing answering the question “What are you doing/thinking?” Your answer to the question may change minute by minute and your answer doesn’t have to respond to anything anyone else has already said. This is the part of Twitter that was really hard for me to grasp. There is no situation in real world social life that is similar. It would be kind of like everyone driving down the highway opening their windows and yelling out random things. You might hear a lot of useless noise or you might hear something helpful and interesting depending on who you are listening to.

Twitter messages can be viewed on cell phones or on the computer. You can also post links, including links to photos. Anyone can read your messages and you can subscribe to other people’s Twitter posts by “following” them or just looking at their Twitter web page. You can spread someone else’s message by “retweeting” it yourself or have a public or private conversation with individual users. The @ sign to refer publicly to an individual person is a Twitter invention, which some people use in other contexts. For example, someone could Twitter:

@rulyllc Great tip! Thanks!

According to The Twitter Book, the average Twitter message has a lifespan of about 5 minutes. Generally, if your tweet is considered interesting, it will be retweeted or shared by others within 5 minutes of your posting. After 5 minutes, the chance anyone will even notice it starts dropping quickly to zero.

The Twitter Book gives a little background on these basic fundamentals and then gives examples of different contexts where you might use Twitter, either as a user or a researcher. Below I will share just a few of the gems in this book:

Twitter Research

Even if you have no desire to create a Twitter account, Twitter can be a great way to monitor mentions about your business. O’Reilly and Milstein give several great ideas here including the following:

1. Track Twitter mentions of your company’s name. Go to search.twitter.com and you can see who is talking about your company and what they are saying.  If you want to continually monitor any tweets about your company, you can pull the RSS feed or use a service like TweetBeep to receive emails when your keywords are mentioned.
2. Track Twittered links to your website. Wondering if anyone is Twittering a link to your website? Go to backtweets.com, type in your company’s website to see a list. You can even be alerted by email when a link to your website is tweeted.

Tweeting Tips

Some of the most valuable parts of The Twitter Book are the quick etiquette tips about the Twitter community. For example:

1. Reply to all of your @ messages where you are addressed directly (unless you think it may be spam).
2. Don’t use up all 140 characters to allow space for people to retweet your posts. The magic formula for your own character limit is 140 minus 4 characters (for RT a space and the @ sign) minus the number of characters in your Twitter username. In my case, that number is 129 characters.
3. If you retweet someone else’s post, make sure they are credited with the @ sign (including all people in the message chain where possible, or if not possible due to the character limit, just the first and last person) and maintain their shortened links as they have posted them.
4. If you quote someone who is not on Twitter, use the word “via” to reference where you got the information from.
5. It’s considered lame to reply to followers with a “Thanks for the follow.” routine message. It is far better to find something interesting they have said and retweet it or call them out with a personalized @ message.

Twitter Visibility

Businesses will especially appreciate the tips in The Twitter Book on attracting followers and visibility. Some of the tips will require time and effort (such as following interesting people and retweeting interesting tweets) but some are pretty simple. For example:

1. To get your Tweets more visibility, learn the Twitter filing system: “hashtags.” Hashtags are keywords with a pound or hash sign in front of them. For example, the hashtag for The Twitter Book is #TwitterBook. If you add a hashtag to your tweets, they will be added to the group of tweets with that same hashtag. To find a list of hashtags, visit hashtags.org.
2. If you are using a Twitter account for your business, put your business name in the “Name” field in your profile rather than the actual name of the person Twittering to make it easier for people to search and find your business.
3. Follow journalists who are looking to write stories in your industry. For example, “Help a Reporter Out” or HARO is Twitter user @petershankman who routinely posts requests for sources from reporters.

If you find the above tips helpful, you will find so many more in The Twitter Book. It is a really quick read in addition to being a solid reference book.

I’m still thinking through the concept of Twitter and how I could use it better. Would readers really want to know my spur-of-the-moment thoughts as I unclutter something or photos of new organizing tools the moment I discover them? Am I comfortable sharing those unpolished thoughts? There are definitely some pitfalls to Twitter but there is no denying it is a powerful communications tool for those who know how to use it.

Do you use Twitter? Have a Twitter tip or a Twitter question? Please share in the comments.

It’s the start of a new month and that means a new theme here at Ruly. In September, we are going to be discussing one of the most vital components of success in your personal and business life . . . communication.

"Classic Red London Telephone Boxes," Photo by niai. From the Flickr Creative Commons.	"Let the Wild Rumpas Begin!" Photo by Kate Ter Haar. From the Flickr Creative Commons.
"I don't dig texting." Photo by Zawezome. From the Flickr Creative Commons.	"Lykketoft viser Facebook" Photo by Jacob Bøtter. From the Flickr Creative Commons.
"LinkedIn Centipede Participants in the 2010 ING Bay to Breakers." Photo by smi23le. From the Flickr Creative Commons.	"Fun Twitter shirt seen at LIFT." Photo by Robert Scoble. From the Flickr Creative Commons.

In 2010, there are so many ways to communicate with people: in-person contact, telephone, snail mail, email, fax, texting, videochat, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc. etc. With all of the ways to communicate, how do you stay on top of all that information? How do you know which is the best way to reach someone? Are new social etiquette rules being formed?

The world of digital communication is evolving so quickly that I don’t think there is one “right” way to communicate. There are a variety of communication strategies and I invite you to share yours! If you are interested in writing a guest blog this month about your personal and/or business communications strategy or even an anonymous rant sharing your frustrations with communicating in the 21st century, please contact me at info@beruly.com. In exchange for your well-crafted words, I would be happy to include in the post a short blurb about your product or service (if applicable) or guest blog on your site in return.

To start, I will share with you my own communications strategy, which I consider a work in progress.

From a business perspective, it has been my philosophy that I want to make it as easy as possible for readers and prospective clients to stay up to date on what I am doing and to contact me. I try to speak their “language” and have this blog, a private email list as well as accounts on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. I generally have the same information updated in all these places continually. I try not to put information in one place that is not reflected in the others since I think it is unrealistic to expect that people will want to take the time to stay up to date on every communication I write in every medium. I also don’t want people to feel alienated if they miss out on something on a network they don’t use.

In other projects I am working on currently, I have the challenge of communicating with a mixed group of people, some of whom use the Internet and some who don’t. It becomes even more difficult to print and mail paper documents reflecting the substance of what occurs in Internet discussions. There is a definite generation gap at work where the majority of the people not using the Internet are older people. Bridging the gap between the digital and paper worlds is tough and time consuming and, despite best efforts, there is always at least some information that never makes it to the paper world.

From a personal perspective, my contacts are all over the place. Some I only ever see in person.  There are some that require paper/snail mail communications (including hard copy photos). Some want the telephone. Most use email. Some text by cell phone. A few are on Facebook and almost none are on Twitter.

Among many people I know, social networking is a hard sell for a variety of reasons. The most common objections I hear are:

1. Fear of humiliation/embarrassment. If you have worked hard to build a reputation in your business life and maintaining that reputation is essential to your job, Facebook can fairly be perceived as having more negatives than positives. The big challenge of Facebook is that you are connecting people from various parts of your personal and professional life into one big group of “friends.” While in the real world, you might selectively share different kinds of information with each group, on Facebook, it is all one big pool. If just one friend posts something inappropriate, whether about you or about them, you could alienate contacts instantly that may have taken years to build. Many people view this downside as outweighing any benefit to Facebook and simply opt out of the process.

2. Intimidation by the online popularity contest. Popularity contests are only fun for popular people. Facebook and Twitter give you the “benefit” of numerically calculating exactly how many friends and followers you have. Who wants to go on the record publicly saying, “Hello, World! I have exactly 2 friends.” I have learned not to assign any value, however to the number of online friends a person has. When I did a quick inventory of my own Facebook friends, I was surprised to find that the people I know who are incredibly popular in real life didn’t have the most online friends while some of my less popular friends had enormous numbers of online friends.

3. It’s uncool. There seems to be a bit of a generation gap (or maybe a personality gap) between my generation and the younger generations that built Facebook and Twitter into the powerhouses they are today. Many of my peers think it is tremendously uncool to join a big group for any reason. They want to be individuals. Fanning a business or joining a cause is something they only do because they have to for some other reason (a relative owns it or they are raising money for a cause). They also think it is geeky to spend so much time on the Internet. The whole concept of social networking is unpleasing to them. Take for example the quotes below:

“So it came to pass that I started logging on to Facebook. And, like seemingly everyone else I’d ever met, eventually S “friended” me. My policy has been always to accept whoever asks, no question, and never to friend anyone myself. (In this way I maintain the fiction that I’m not an active user.)”

–Kate Bolick, “A Death on Facebook,” The Atlantic, September 2010

“I am still trying to keep my daily screen-time to the absolute minimum. Those of you who are trying to find me on Facebook, please be warned that I will probably never find the time to become your friend. But I do love you.”

–Artist Alex Martin of The Little Brown Dress Project fame.

I seem to meet a lot of these individualistic friends. Even when I have tried to friend them on Facebook, I run into that awkward privacy screen where Facebook basically says, “Yes, this person is a user but no you cannot contact them even to ask whether they will be your friend. They are in the Facebook void.”

Even if you do manage to friend someone, there is always the chance they are “ignoring” you electronically without your knowledge. The Washington Post recently wrote about new technologies to block Twitter communications from unwanted users:

“The problem with one big water cooler is that you don’t always want to be at the water cooler with everyone all the time,” said Bretton MacLean, a Toronto developer of a popular iPhone app called TweetAgora, which lets users block unwanted tweets without the tweeter ever knowing. As the company puts it, “Some people are great in real life but just plain suck at Twitter.”

–Michael S. Rosenwald, “Too much Tweeting from Twitter friends? There’s an iPhone app for that — and some other ways to get anti-social on networks.” The Washington Post, August 29, 2010.

And yet even if these three objections speak loudly and clearly to you and Facebook and Twitter seem like too much drama, I don’t think any of us, particularly those in business, can ignore social networking entirely. Just like those who don’t want to learn the Internet and want everything mailed or telephoned, you can’t expect that everyone else is going to cater your needs.

It seems that social networking is here to stay although I am sure it will probably continue to evolve and improve over time. The number of people we can connect with is truly incredible. I do sense a little social fatigue setting in, though. Sometimes we don’t want key life events shared in one mass mailing. We miss the intimacy of the slow-moving social grapevine–being the first to know rather than just “one of the friends.”  This may be something we see addressed in future versions of social networks.

How do you communicate with your friends, family and business associates? Do you have a suggestion for me to improve Ruly’s communication strategy? Please share in the comments. And if you want to guest blog this month, please contact me at info@beruly.com.

It has been another great month for organizing news.  Highlights from this month’s news stories:

Recession Eating Trends

A recent MarketWatch story indicates that the recession is taking its toll on our waistlines.  As  we are driven to economize, we are buying heat-and-eat meals from the grocery store that are significantly less healthy for us than the restaurant meals we previously consumed.   The article provides some suggestions to eat healthy at home.

Clean Spouses Versus Messy Spouses

This great article from the Wall Street Journal provides a hilarious but disturbing look at the tensions that arise in a marriage when one spouse is tidy and the other is messy.  You will not believe the antics when the messy spouses rebel! 

More Twitter Angst

Following up on last month’s news summary about organizing your communications on social networking sites, Therese Poletti at MarketWatch discusses the sad state of affairs when your real-life friends are not also your social networking friends:

After one month, I have five followers. My friends don’t even follow me. But some of them want me to follow them, of course, and sent me e-mails that they were looking for me on Twitter. So I followed them, and got nothing back. The publisher of my book isn’t even following me.

Is this bumming me out? Um, yes, a little bit.

–Therese Poletti, “What if Your Friends Won’t Follow You on Twitter,” MarketWatch, November 12, 2009

Brain Capacity

If you have ever felt that your brain is so full of information that you need to forget some information in order to fit more in, it turns out that your instinct is right.  U.S. News and World Report reports on New scientific research from the University of Toyama in Japan that shows that it is possible to fill up your short-term memory.  When your short-term memory is at capacity, the brain has to transfer the information to other parts of the brain and erase it from short-term memory in order to fit in more new information.  The research also shows that exercise might help to increase your brain capacity.

Dustology

NPR profiled a story about research on dust that might motivate us all to vacuum and dust regularly.   

One thing that’s remarkable about dust is that it sticks around. Without vacuuming, [Andrea Ferro of Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y.] says, it can stick around for a long time. . . “We’re finding things like [the pesticide] DDT in many floor dust samples,” says Ferro. “We banned that decades ago, but it’s still there.”

Type to you on Wednesday!  For my American readers, I hope you enjoy a short workweek this week and safe travels to your Thanksgiving destinations.

This month, there have been several interesting news stories related to organizational topics. These stories highlight some of the emerging issues in organization and illustrate some unique responses to organizational needs.

Organizing Your Thoughts: Choosing Your Communication Tools

One of the biggest challenges for many people and businesses today is navigating the sea of communication options available. People are no longer communicating just by email or text message. Some now “live” on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. If you don’t live there too, you could be missing out on important opportunities to connect with your friends, family or customers.

For many people, social networking is intimidiating. On top of the need to learn new technology, each medium comes with its own set of rules to follow about the style of language to be used and the appropriate actions accepted. The etiquette for these media is still a work in progress and there are as many opportunities for embarrassment for the uninitiated as there are opportunities for the social networking pro to make a positive impression.

Some of the thought-provoking stories in this area this month:

“You can argue that because we have more ways to send more messages, we spend more time doing it. That may make us more productive, but it may not. . . . And we will no doubt waste time communicating stuff that isn’t meaningful, maybe at the expense of more meaningful communication.”

Why Email No Longer Rules – The Wall Street Journal, October 12, 2009

“Twitter doesn’t allow room for reflection. It gets people to the barest emotion.”

Short Outbursts on Twitter? #Big Problem – The New York Times, October 8, 2009

“When someone tells you that they don’t have Facebook, it’s untouchable. It’s a sign of disrespect to try to convince them.”

In a Generation That Friends and Tweets, They Don’t – The Washington Post, October 15, 2009

Cleaning is Sexy!

Need some motivation to clean your house? A new study published in the Journal of Family Studies indicates that housework is the ultimate aphrodesiac.

“A survey of 2,020 U.S. adults placed “sharing household chores” as the third most important factor in a successful marriage, behind faithfulness and a happy sexual relationship, says the nonprofit Pew Research Center. . . . [H]ousework outranked even such necessities as adequate income and good housing.”

Housework Pays Off Between the Sheets – The Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2009

The Best Endorsement for Index Tabs . . . Ever!

In case you need proof that organization matters, even down to the smallest details, like index tabs, check out the video below of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. As everyone knows (or should know), Captain Sullenberger executed the miracle emergency landing of U.S. Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River earlier this year, saving the lives of all passengers and crew onboard. Here, he discusses his new book and his recommendation for organizational improvements in airline emergency manuals.

Hope these articles have given you some food for thought this Wednesday. As always, your comments are welcome!