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.

You may have been wondering where the hell I’ve been lately. I do apologize. It’s been rude of me to go off and leave you like this. But I’ve been working rather hard on remodeling this place, since I put this blog together rather hurriedly and it doesn’t really reflect me in the way I’d like it to.

Meanwhile, I’ve been scoping out some really great resources that I’d love to share with you.

• Grain Edit
• Kuler – for color
• Smashing Magazine – Web Trends

I also realized that, probably as a symptom of being a Gemini, when I talk to myself, I call myself we. Not like the royal we, but like there are more than one of me to talk to. It makes me feel less alone, but I can’t believe I only now noticed this. Interesting. Anyone else do this? Please?

Anyway, if you’re looking for me, you can find me on Twitter, where I’d love to have your company. While I’m talking to myself and shifting website designs about, I do manage to spout out a few sentences now and then. But no worries. By the time I get to my/our birthday in June, we’ll have all my pontifications in one spot. Thanks for your patience while we’re under construction.

We’ve been combing through some old front pages of the Post here at the office, in preparation for an exhibit that will be open to the public around Inauguration time. Keep your eyes open for that. It’s been mesmerizing to see how the more things change, the more they stay the same.

1) Advertising on the front page was in vogue decades ago, and many papers have brought it back.

2) The twitter, or short quotable thought, was also quite popular ages back. News was more personal and personable.

3) The Post was more locally focused. The news came back to how Washingtonians were effected. And that’s the newest ‘change’ in how the paper is operating. More local focus.

For your enjoyment, here’s a vintage front page. The big news of this day: the atomic bomb changes war and science. And, in local news, Major Bong is hit.

Fashion question of the day: What is the most appropriate event at which to show off one’s Hood Thong?

Bonus question: Real or web joke?

There are really awards for everything now!

Awards for the best Twitterer have been announced… the Shorty Awards!

Nominations/votes will be accepted until midnight on December 31. Check it out at shortyawards.com.

Check it out – the New York Times finally took notice of Squidoo. If you can’t figure out how Squidoo fits into the internet puzzle, this is a good breakdown.
NY Times story

And don’t forget to check out my Squidoo pages, starting with my hottest one, How to Meet a Celebrity

You may or may not have heard about Seth Godin’s latest project, Squidoo. I’ve been privileged to be part of the beta testing team, and I’ve got 4 “lenses” on the site (links on the sidebar).

Briefly, the concept behind Squidoo is that everyone is an expert on something. And the growing information database that is the World Wide Web needs some help indexing, besides just automated keyword searches.

Keyword searches and pay-for-placement search results don’t guarantee an Internet user that they are going to find quality sites. But Squidoo’s mission is to get real people to create “lenses” on topics they know about. These lenses index websites and blogs that lead Internet users to websites that have quality information.

Q: So what does a lens look like?

A: Check out Best of DC or any one of the links in the sidebar. It’s a page with links to helpful sites on the Internet.

More information is available on the Squidoo blog and on the Squidoo website. Right now it’s just launching into public beta, but I wanted to share. I know there are other indexing projects out there, but this one seems to be very well organized and it has a great marketing organization behind it. The fact that it is set up as a co-op that will forseeably share royalties with the lensmasters doesn’t hurt, either.