Next time you’re twittering from the toilet, please use the hashtag #toilettweet or #twit2 if you want to be discreet (twittering while in toilet). We’ll see how accurate emarketer’s study on twitter from the crapper stats are.

CoTweet Rules!

When you’re juggling your digital life, your clients digital life and everything else that falls in between, my Twitter Savior is CoTweet. CoTweet allows its users to manage up to 6 accounts with one user login name. Having a platform to focus on multiple conversations across various twitter accounts permits businesses and personal tweeters to keep their Twitter life active and thriving. I efficiently manage my personal account @yiannig and GradeGuru’s business account @gradeguru with multiple team members (marketing, technical support and customer service).

For business purposes, CoTweet helps companies organize the execution of their Twitter presence and engage with their customers using Twitter. Through CoTweet, you can give tweet assignments to your colleagues to follow up with tweets from your customers and keep track through conversation threading to their responses. The application will present which tweets have been responded to and display which of your colleagues responded to whom. There is also the option of Tweet Scheduling, which gives you the ability to prepare tweets ahead of time and deliver a consistent flow of updates throughout the day. However, if not used carefully this can dehumanize your twitter brand and become slightly robotic. The purpose of Twitter and social media is to engage naturally with your customer!

More Twitter Applications I Use:

iPhone App: Tweetie

Tweetie allows you to handle multiple Twitter accounts, view your timeline, replies, direct messages favorites, post pictures and shorten urls. You can also browse friends, followers, post new tweets, retweets, reply to @replies and direct messages. You can follow and unfoloow people and basically your twizness (twitter +business) from the palm of your hand.

Blackberry App: Tiny Twitter

Tiny Twitter seems to be rocking the Blackberry and Windows Mobile Decice Twitter world. It give you font and sunc settings with a Tweet Ticker that runs showing your most recent tweets. Any other Blackberry apps out there?

Twitter Search: Use Twitter search to find certain keywords in all the conversation happening in real time. This is an essential tool for any kind of proactive marketing or customer service Twitter strategy. (CoTweet also has a Twitter search functionality integrated in it and you can run mutitple queries at a time).

TweetBeep – Gives free Twitter alerts by email, similar to Google Alerts. This tool allows you to keep track of various conversations based on your assigned keywords such as you company name, your competitors or particular products (CoTweet als has this function).

Twitpic – Lets you share picture on Twitter. You can post picture to Twitpic from you phone, API – upload an image to TwitPic and send it as a status udpate, or post to the site itself.

Bit.ly – Used for URL shortening. I love the tracking referral tool that comes with bit.ly and CoTweet also allows you to link your bit.ly account to it. You want to shorten your URLs because Twitter only allows you 140 characters for each tweet, limiting what you can say if you use a long URL. You also always want to leave 20 free characters or so so others can ReTweet your posts (refered to as “RT” on a tweet).

New Twitter applications are created everyday for all sorts of uses. It you have a great app suggestions, DM me @yiannig or comment below. I’ll do my best to keep you posted on the most effective stuff I find to make your tweeting experience a productive and fun one.

Thanks to all of my followers! You bring the news to me and anything worth checking out in the internet.

Here is the link to the video and slides of the SIIA Panel Discussion we attended yesterday. You can also get the slides at Barry Graubart’s Content Matters blog. The Panel moderators included:

@graubart Barry Graubart VP, Product Strategy, Alacra
@ppealman Phill Pearlman, Director, StockTwits
@harrisj Jacob Harris, Senior Architect, New York Times Digital
@pop17 Sarah Austin, Founder, Pop17

Some key take-aways:

• Twitter is not about “what are you doing?” anymore. It’s about “What would you like to share?”
• Twitter community growth seems to be parallel to on and off line growth
• Twitter is starting to get more professional and brands are finding unique ways to extend their offerings through the micro-blogging platform
• Although the demographic of Twitter is more professionals, 30-50, there seems to be a significant increase in younger, college age people joining Twitter
• The power of Twitter as an information dissemination tool lies in the Re-Tweet (RT)
• If you keep your tweets to 120 characters, you make it easier for people to RT your content
• Twitter is the social RSS
• Instead of using tinyurl.com, use bit.ly for as your URL shortener, which allows you to track number of clicks
• Twitter is great for SEO

GradeGuru on Twitter

@GradeGuru serves as a resource for students to connect with us and request notes specific to their courses, tests or assignments. If you’re a student and you have a biology exam tomorrow that you could use some additional support on, you can send us a message on Twitter via @reply or direct message telling us about your needs and we will reply with links to relevant notes and resources.

If you’re a education technology fan or a web 2.0 enthusiast, we’d love to connect with you too! We regularly discuss developments and news about the web 2.0 and education technology space.

Thank you for all that participated. A special thanks to Barry Graubart for leading the discussion and Jenny Hansen from SIIA for a wonderful event.

There are many useful social media tools to help journalist and PR professionals find each other. I still haven’t found the Match.com of PR pros and journalists, but I’ve become particularly fond of these three – MediaOnTwitter, HARO and TweetBeep.

MediaOnTwitter is a Twitter database for media contacts. The list is not huge but it’s definitely growing. Some interesting folks on this list include John A. Byrne, Editor-in-Chief of BusinessWeek.com, Kara Swisher, columnist at AllThingD.com, several CNET contributors, etc.

• MediaOnTwitter now allows media, public relations and other professionals to:
• COLLECT media contact information using a web form that automatically populates in a shareable database;
• ORGANIZE a growing list of media and bloggers from around the world as well as sort and view contacts by country, media outlet or name; and
• SHARE media on Twitter information through dynamic published reports accessible at three locations.

After April 20, the MediaOnTwitter database will be permanently housed on:http://PRSarahEvans.com and http://www.DigitalIdeamedia.com.

LINK: Sarah Evans

Another useful source for media Twitter contacts is the Twittering Journalists wiki.

Thanks to @prsarahevans @skydiver @melissahourigan @edunigan @briansolis for your collaborative efforts on MediaOnTwitter.

Help a Reporter Out (HARO) is a daily media queries resource that sends you emails in the morning, afternoon and evening for free. Often these queries are more relevant than the queries from ProfNet, which you pay big bucks for. Follow @skydiver, the creator, as he sometimes tweets urgent queries before adding them on his daily emails.

Tweetbeep is a free Twitter alert by email. Include keywords of your brand, competitors, etc and check out what people are saying about you on Twitter. BusinessWeek.com just wrote a great article about how businesses can use Twitter to get consumers. Tweetbeep is one of those tools that can expand the functionality of Twitter to allow you to stay on top of your consumer’s needs.

True story – I was contacted by a company that sells insect resistant mattress covers after Twittering about finding bed bugs in my NYC apartment. I bought $200 worth of mattress covers a week later.

Are you a marketing/PR professional? If so, what other tools do you regularly use to stay on top of media opportunities?

Bloggeries of the Week – a weekly post recounting the events and absurdities of my week on and off-line:

The spot light on @yiannig, @juliaroy and @lucyblair at the TweetupNYC event on Monday. The CEO of Twitter was there along with some awesome Twitter folks. Great to meet you guys face to face.

My hat goes off to the author of Fluent Simplicity for creating this amazing list of organizations, companies, executives, brands and other influential constituencies participating in the Twitter community. This is a great resource.

http://blog.fluentsimplicity.com/twitter-brand-index/

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qrmTJWbmdU&feature=related]

I just met Alana and she rules!!!

Check out her blog http://alanataylor.blogspot.com/

and the lyrics to the Twitter song:

When I wake up in the morning,
The first thing I see,
Is an e-mail in my Gmail,
Sayin’ you’re followin’ me.

And next thing you know,
I’m followin’ you,
Not everybody does it,
But me and Scoble do.

Chorus:
Cuz Twitter beats Facebook any day,
140 characters is all you need to say.

Cool thing ’bout Twitter is you meet new people,
You even get to stalk the famous ones too,
We’ve got Veronica Belmont from Mahalo Daily,
Barack Obama and Hugh MacLeod too.

Chorus

Twitter’s like a family,
As long as you’re not spamming me,
We keep in touch, we share too much,
And @Garyvee meets up for lunch!

Chorus

But be careful, with you’re iPhone…
Don’t DM the whole worlldddddd

Chorus

Today I received my 200th follower on Twitter! I appreciate all of my followers and look forward to learning more about you.

If you follow me, I’ll follow you. My only condition is that you are a legitimate Twitter community member and not someone who is trying to leverage the community solely for self-promotion. So, if you follow me and I go to your profile and it shows that you are following 5,000 people but only 89 are following you back, then I will not follow you. You are using Twitter to talk, not listen. The shotgun marketing approach doesn’t work here buddy. Stick to ads.

To everyone else (all of my dear followers), you are beautiful and interesting. It is my pleasure tuning in to your daily Tweets. I learn from you.

Yianni

Utterz.com is definitely a step up from Twitter. I recognize the value of Twitter:It has a huge network, serves as a news alert or traffic maximizing tool depending on how you built your network. And, it’s fun to rant. I get it. However, I can hardly ever start a conversation on Twitter. I’ll write, “I had a good time yesterday @YourMoms” and YourMoms never writes back. Heartbreaking. Plus I have too much to say for 140 characters.

The superiority of Utterz is clear:

1. No 140 character limit

2. Not just text but videos, sound and images too!

3. Mobile functionalities that update your Utterz, Facebook and even blog.

4. Cool interface that promotes community building (“Topic of the day” for example)

But like every web application, Utterz drops the ball here and there:

1. There is just way too much COW. It reminds me of my aunt’s kitchen, which has cow print everywhere.

2. Too along with the Moo brand madness, why call the login name, “Handle?” That is not cute, that is Utterly confusing.

3. I wish it were easier to find the people I know.

Utterz might just be the next big thing. What do you think? What about Jaiku?

Check out my Utterz

My Handle (Grrr…I hate that) is socialmediaguy. FOLLOW ME!