I’m looking forward to embarking on a new adventure as a corporate tweeter. As such, I’ve taken a good deal of time accumulating best practices for corporate accounts. Many of these are the same as I would recommend for anyone operating a business Twitter account for themselves:

1. Have a mission/message in mind before you post your first tweet.
2. Your message should also consider your target audience.
3. Twitter directories are a good way to gain some followers initially, but there is no get followers quick solution.
4. Be selective in following. There is no need to follow everyone who follows you.
5. Be careful of your language. This is even more important for corporations than for individuals.
6. Your posts are 100% public. Remember that bad news travels faster than good news and anything your shareholders wouldn’t like will travel out of the Twitterverse and onto TV screens and into newspapers.
7. Corporations need to select a voice. It’s best if one person, or a couple of people, man the account, for consistency, and to be sure there’s no redundancy. Most corporations invoke the royal ‘we.’  Other more customer-service oriented Twitter accounts have used an individual speaking from the first person.
8. A regular stream of content is important to any Twitter feed to maintain followers. Appropriate corporate topics include:

• • respond to follower/customer inquiries
  • retweet satisfied customer tweets
  • link to updated/interesting information on corporate websites/blogs
  • retweet updates from affiliated Twitter accounts
  • Twitter contests
  • advance notice of corporate news
  • Twitter discount codes
  • stimulate Twitter discussions with product-related questions
  • product-related trivia
  • run online surveys
  • photos of corporate events

Have some other ideas? Please share in the comments!

Bird art by Triax Mills.

I just did a little independent research. We’ve got a lot of Senators up for election this year, so I wanted to see what they have been up to, just the committees they are parts of, as a highlight. A quick reference for you, based on their own web pages:

Senator Joe Biden

• Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
• Chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs
• Chairman of the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control
• Member of the International Anti-Piracy Caucus
• Member of the Senate Anti-Meth Caucus
• Member of the Congressional Fire Services Caucus

Senator John McCain

• Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Armed Services
• Ranking Member and former Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation
• Member and former Chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs

Senator Barack Obama

• Senate Foreign Relations Committee
• Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs
• Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
• Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs

Gov. Sarah Palin (N/A, but here’s a link to her website)

Anderson Cooper’s 360 announced today” Since joining the Republican ticket, Sarah Palin hasn’t said a peep about her religion so we decided to look into her beliefs for a piece on AC360 tonight.”

The scariest thing about all of this is that we have heard so little from Sarah Palin herself and the election is less than two months away from today. Trying to guess a candidate’s beliefs by videos and things her minister said is unfair now, as it was to Obama.

BUT it is worrying to not know more about this woman stands on national and international issues.

The nation is obviously anxious for access, to ask her questions on these issues and others (like separation of church and state).

Obviously McCain wants Palin on the campaign trail, but it’s time to let the free press do its job, and ask the questions that the American people need the answers to. McCain, Obama and Biden have been under the glass for over a year, answering the hard and sometimes painful questions from the press and the people. It’s Palin’s turn.

Step up and speak for yourself, Palin!

It’s the last week of Fishnet Music, a record store I opened 3 years ago with my friend Lisa and her mother Terry in Ocean City, MD.
Our doors will close Friday, March 31 after lots of blood, sweat and tears – mine has been mostly remote, e-mailing ads and website updates from DC, after the first summer of driving back and forth every weekend.
If you live down there, please stop by and get some great deals on CDs and records at our close-out sale. If not, think of us this week. It’s hard to say goodbye. We met some wonderful bands that played in-store performances for us, and really enjoyed giving people an alternative place to look for and learn about music.
www.fishnetmusic.com

Working at my record store, and hanging out at nightclubs promoting shows, I ran into a lot of kids that worked on ’street teams.’ Basically, if you were a big enough fan, and really wanted to be a part of the music biz — and I mean REALLY — the band’s label would send you stacks of stickers, postcards, CD samplers and flyers to distribute around town. Street teams are supposed to be the grassroots tentacles that know the local areas (which stores are cool, which skate shops will let you stack CDs for handing out) better than a label does, and then when the band makes it big, the street team will get their pay backs. We hope it happens for them.

The problem is there are tons of street teams for tons of up-and-coming bands and our record store always had lots of leftover CD samplers of no-name bands that we couldn’t pay people to take away.

The success was there however. And somebody somewhere made some money using street teams. And now, those people are old and don’t want to go running around town, but they are willing to post something on their blog. Or at least, these folks are hoping I will.

Darn, I just did.