The Unofficial Twitter Glossary

So I’ve been twittering a bit - and I like Twitter. It has turned into a pretty good way to keep up with folks without having to do a lot of work. It’s got some value - not sure what yet, outside of being a cool tool to keep up with folks.

However, as I’m following people about, I’ve realized that there are a few types of Twitterers. Some great - some not so much. I’ve decided to arbitrarily label them and put them into boxes below. Folks can fit into multiple boxes…

Tweeach - A Twitter Leach. Constantly asking others for stuff, and never providing anything back of value. They’re their to suck you dry and have no creativity. Easily identified by their constant asking of stupid or banal questions, and when they do tweet, it’s self-serving.

Celebritweet - Scoble, Calacanis, Laporte. Don’t need to say any more - usually in the 10k-20k follower range. YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary), especially if you’re a fan.

Comtweetian - Hotdogladies, Hodgman. The main motivation of their twittering is to be funny. Again, YMMV depending on your sense of humor.

Twittertool - Twittering because it’s the “in” thing to do, usually about once per day, and usually self-serving, always boring. Hence the “tool” part.

The Tweedia - Twitter feeds from media sources, such as MLive or CNN. I’d rather just subscribe to the RSS feed, but valuable if you use Twitter as your nexus of information.

Tweetspammer - Uses twitter to spew the platitudes of their product or service - or blog.  Usually highly focused, sometimes motivated by a $20 online program that told them doing this will increase their Google ranking somehow.

Emotweeter - Denoted by common uses of the word “Fail” and “Sucks.”  The world is a dark, dark place to them.  Follow with caution as misery loves company.

Housetweet - Usually a housewife (or houseman) who may have kids, but doesn’t do much else so most tweets are cute kid stories and waiting for the hubby or wife to come home.

Gossitweet - A troublemaker.  Either spreading rumors or finding ways to hook up with people for flings.  Online equivalent of a high school gossip queen, which unfortunately, evolves (I use the the term evolve very loosely) into worse as an adult.

Do you have additions or addendums?  I’d love to hear’em.

A Secret To Making Money Online

I love the guys at 37signals - they’re not perfect, but they make solid products and do something that so many web companies don’t - that’s make money.  It seems like again we as a community are completely forgetting about it.

Check out this fabulous presentation at Startup School. It’s about 30 minutes long.

How To Give Away an Article To Get Value

There is a lot of debate in the “give to get” community about how to give away something but also get something - like a lead - from it.

Some have eschewed the idea altogether - saying that giving away a white paper or article or something is a waste of time.

And I think not. I think it can have tons of value to you, if you understand that the online business world is not about scarcity, it’s about quality.

Let’s cover what not to do.

Don’t stick up your potential visitors. What do I mean by stick up? No, you’re not robbing them of money but you’re trying to grab their identity - and when you provide nothing for it except the hint that you might get a whitepaper or something interesting - you’re going to get a lot of Elmer Fudds and abandonments (and no, they’re not going to tell you they left).

Don’t make me contact you directly to get it by phone or otherwise. I won’t, and most people won’t.

Show your value by putting the first third or quarter of your valuable genius on your web site as HTML. Search engines will love it, and you will have captured the reader wanting more (again, this goes back to quality - it has to be good or it won’t work. And you can create good. You can create great).

You then insert your low-friction (as small as it possibly can be while getting the information you need to contact them) information form there.

You’ll get much better responses as they - your audience - will be engaged. If you’re really slick, have your programmer give them the rest of the document after form acceptance, right in-line with what they’re reading, as well as give them the option to keep a well-laid out, branded PDF version with your logo inserted with class.

That means once per page, at a reasonably small (yet readable) size. Put your contact and copyright information on each page as well - since they love what you have to say and find it valuable, you should let them talk to you!

Don’t be so concerned if your competition reads it - they will. And you should be reading theirs. Your potential customers are going to have them side-by-side anyway. Again, win with quality - and win the business.

Technorati Tags:
Web Design, how to give away stuff, give to get value, how to give away content

Upgrade Your Installations… now.

With the apparent hacking of the Applephoneshow.com blog and others floating around, it’s become known that there are various exploits in older version of the popular Wordpress blogging/CMS platform running anything that’s older than version 2.3.3.

Frankly, if you have a Wordpress blog or any site (there are vulnerabilities for basically everything out there) you have a responsibility to others viewing your site and yourself (to prevent things like Technorati and other search engine de-listing) to upgrade, since obsolete code could allow hackers to inject unwanted links as well as code that can execute download spyware on your visitors’ computers.

If your host for some reason can’t support it, you should go change hosts or upgrade (it won’t be much money). Code does become obsolete; so it’s important to keep on top of things for the sake of your site, your search ranking, and your brand.. you don’t want to be known as the company that gave people who visited your site viruses.

p.s. - Some people think that it’s an intentional un-ending cycle by developers to keep having holes. It’s really not. It’s a cat-and-mouse game because no code is infallible.

Special thanks to @johnfoster for picking up the source article from Geek Ramblings, with a very cool header image. Fighting robots rock.

Addendum: Big blog ZDnet was hacked as well, and the problem is pretty wide-spread among non-upgraded sites.  Not to mention, here’s confirmation Technorati is delisting non-upgraded blogs.

Camp Baby Johnson & Johnson Blogger Debacle Synopsis

I really can’t add anything to this… the link is pretty much perfect on it’s own.  Read and learn.

Many thanks to @shannonpaul for picking it out and @contactjeff for writing it (on Twitter).

4 links for the 4th day of the week

I’m swamped with stuff to do… so I will throw you some great links that I’ve seen that I’ll probably be talking more about later.

How today’s CEO can, and almost have to, manage the media with new media and other items…

Monster.com ad truck was assigned by Monster (with copy of orders on post) to park outside of Craigslist and get a photo… of note, Monster.com is a huge company that’s getting tarred and feathered in traffic by people who work in a small converted house on a narrow street (click through on the photo on the blog to see the Flickr highlights)…

Want to be productive?  Have a topless meeting… no laptops, blackberrys, nothing.  No distraction points.  Merlin Mann is a genius.

Is DEMO dead?  What about paying $18,500 for speaking?  Jason Calacanis thinks so, but he’s doing the competing Techcrunch 50.

Me on Global Business Podcast Talking Tech

Technology has really changed global and international business… did an interview over at Global Business Perspectives about technology (specifically things like Skype) that have transformed how we do business.

I tried to be as non-techy as possible, especially for their audience… it’s tough for me