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.

It’s the beginning of 2010, and I’ve gotta set my goals! Last year I gave up buying plastic water bottles, and it worked! I recommend it to everyone. We saved lots of money, and got attached to our water bottles and filtering system. It works just fine, and now we’ve got more room in the refrigerator for BEER! ☺

So here are the resolutions:

• More writing: journal every day, on paper. Some stuff didn’t get recorded last year because I didn’t want to share it with the world. So I need to organize my thoughts on paper first.
• More exercise: get in that gym, at least twice a week.
• More travel: including within DC. There are some great exhibits and museums that I need to see. Concerts and shows, too!
• Home improvement: continue to green my lifestyle, purge the junk and organize the good stuff.
• Taco night on Mondays: to simplify menu planning and because we like tacos. ☺

Wish me luck, and I wish you luck with your resolutions… if you’ve made them? If you haven’t yet, I hereby give you til the end of January to come up with some. We’ve got 11 months to go, folks. That’s a lot of time to pick something to improve on or have fun with.

Most importantly,

★  ♪ ♫   Happy New Year! ♪ ♫ ♪ ★

I come back from vacation to learn that once again The Washington Post is in the news, which is a crazy sort of meta situation that I’m learning to live with. Journalists like to write about journalism and Washington likes to talk about one of its oldest employers. But this is just silliness.

If there was a fight in your office, what would happen? Would there be gossip in the lunch room? Chats in the parking lot? Not here. A spat in The Post newsroom gets splattered onto blogs all over town and blown out of proportion.

Here are some of the stories that posted around town. My favorite is the perspective from Gene Weingarten, a veteran Washington Post columnist, who still writes for The Washington Post Magazine.

• Mediabistro: Fishbowl DC
• The Washingtonian’s Capitol Comment blog
• Politico’s Click
• Washington City Paper’s City Desk
• The Washington Post: Gene Weingarten’s Chatalogical Humor
• Wonkette: Brawl At WaPo Office
• update: Washington City Paper’s YouTube video
• update: Tonsil: Hank Steuver
• update: Washington City Paper’s Final Thoughts

As I find more response and feedback, I’m adding it. The way this story is unfolding is really intriguing to me for obvious reasons.

It’s not news that lots of folks have been losing their jobs lately.

What’s been news to me is how many people, when they lose their job, are left scrambling to put together a current resume. You don’t want to waste time hunting down the dates and names of places you worked when you should be customizing your cover letter or tweaking a few lines for your dream job.

Not everyone is always looking towards their next job. But it never hurts to have your resume up to date. It’s like your financial portfolio. Just because you’re not ready to cash it in doesn’t mean you shouldn’t keep it in tip-top shape.

To keep your resume in ready-to-go shape at all times without constantly acting like you’ve got one foot out the door:

1. As soon as you get a new job, add it to the resume that just landed you the new gig. It’s going to be hard to remember the date of your first day at work a few months down the road. Your resume is a good place to jot it down.
2. Use Linked In or a similar website to keep track of your jobs. This is also a great way to ask for recommendations, and to keep in touch with former employers and co-workers for when references are requested.
3. When you gain a new asset, such as learning a new software package or attaining a new certification, add that to your resume immediately. At the same time, you might want to remove outdated terminology and software that’s not being used much anymore. (Removing WordPerfect from your list is safe at this point, in my opinion.)
4. Keep a copy of your resume in multiple formats: hard copy, Word document and PDF at a minimum. If you have any website publishing skills on your resume, I’d have an HTML copy of your assets as well.
5. Forecast a complete computer meltdown. Since a best-case scenario means that you won’t need this resume for a LONG time, figure out a way to archive your resume in more than one place. It may need to outlast the computer you’re writing it on. That’s another good reason to put it in multiple formats. Consider e-mailing it to yourself in multiple places, including a web-based e-mail account. Keep it on a USB drive or external hard drive.
6. Above all, you’ll want to be sure your resume is free of grammatical errors and emphasizes the active responsibility you took in each position you held. If you can’t find a copyeditor within your budget, then have every bright person you know read it over for mistakes.

I sure hope you don’t need to distribute your resume, but remember haste makes waste. Be prepared with your best representation of your experience at all times. I wish you all the success in the world.

These are some of my favorite writing tips culled from a little seminar I’m helping on for non-writers.

1. Make your point first.
2. Don’t make your reader work to find your meaning.
3. Follow with clearly defined explanation/features & benefits.
4. Respect your reader’s time.
5. Don’t just write. Communicate.
6. Edit for clarity. Edit out jargon.

Our job is to bring the dead facts to life.
— William Bernbach

Thanks to Twitter, I was introduced to a new blog this morning. The post I found really got me excited about editing. It was titled, “Writing without typos is totally outdated.” I was horrified! The blogger kicked off her post by saying,

Will everyone please shut up about the typos on blogs? … Because anyone who is trying to come up with fresh ideas, and convey them in an intelligent, organized way, on a daily basis, has way too many things on their plate to complain about other peoples’ typos.”

In my opinion, conveying your ideas in an intelligent, organized way includes checking your writing for typos. But this blogger goes on to say,

There is a new economy for writing. The focus has shifted toward taking risks with conversation and ideas, and away from hierarchical input (the editorial process) and perfection.”

What? I certainly understand that not every blogger can afford a content editor and a pool of copyeditors. But to say that moving towards risky ideas means moving away from the pursuit of writing perfection, is just sad.

The perfect paragraph does have a place in blogging, and to get it, you need to do some editing. Why should a blogger spend time editing?

1. Edited writing is easier to read. If the practices of good writing are overlooked, ideas can be misunderstood. In the first quote above, it sounds like my colleague is writing about “other peoples’ typos” – but she’s complaining about people who complain about her writing errors in the comment area of her blogs. You can read her post in its entirety yourself if you like.
2. Every impression on the internet is your first impression. Make it a good one! Since you never know how someone may encounter your site, you might have one post to demonstrate your expertise. This blogger is giving out career advice, but in the comments of this post — and in another post — she advises that a typo within a resume is a fine idea, and I’m never going back.
3. Don’t distract readers from your brilliance! An error you made in grammar or spelling confuses your reader, slows the rhythm of your sentence, and dulls the impact of your intelligent ideas. There’s simply no reason for it.
4. Respect your readers. The average reader is looking for a clearly constructed sentence with no misspellings or typographical errors. If you’re asking for someone to read your blog once, it’s fair to expect you’ve read it at least once after you wrote it. So — read it twice. Your writing is a representation of you. Have some pride in what you’re putting out there for the world to see.

Need some tips? Here are some great writing resources:

• The Associated Press Stylebook
• The Elements of Style
• The Chicago Manual of Style
• Lapsing Into a Comma : A Curmudgeon’s Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print–and How to Avoid Them
• The Elephants of Style : A Trunkload of Tips on the Big Issues and Gray Areas of Contemporary American English
• The Slot, a spot for copyeditors, by Bill Walsh

Let me know what you think, and if you’ve got some other good writing or editing resources to add to the list.

Designing a website takes a lot of hard work, a lot of thought, and in my case, a lot of blood, sweat and tears, quite literally. I’ve already gotten numerous paper cuts and they make me cry.

If you’re asking why I’m getting paper cuts for a website, then you obviously are not working hard enough on yours. Things need to be written down and considered, scribbled out and written sideways, then typed out or designed and printed out, only to be scribbled out again. But the following websites have provided me with some great information to kickstart my site, and I think they would help just about anyone.

1. WordPress: Planning Session – Even if you’re not creating a blog, this page asks some very important questions about your website. It will help you create your Mission Plan for your site, and without that, you have no idea where you’re going.
2. Smashing Magazine: Web Design Trends 2009 – Before you go and create a great-looking site, have you seen how wonderful the web looks these days? Many of us are stuck in a groove, visiting the same old sites over and over again. Take a look at what’s new right now and find some inspiration.
3. Site Map – Sketch one out. Even if it’s just for you. Even if you only have three pages on your site. It will help for file organization, and that is very handy down the road.
4. Kuler - Choose your color palette. If you’re working with Adobe tools, you can download a plugin that puts these colors right into your software. Awesome. If not, just browse around and snap a screenshot when you see some colors that work for you. More inspiration. You might want to find the web-safe versions of these colors and jot those codes down.
5. CSS Zen Garden – See what CSS stylesheets can do for you. This site lets you browse through a variety of CSS stylesheets as applied to a single web page. Again, inspiration, with the CSS sheets readily available, at no cost to you.
6. Webdesigner Depot – I recommend you read this site on a regular basis. (During your site design process.) It’s full of all kinds of tips and solutions for designers at all levels.
7. ProBlogger – When it comes time to put some content in your site, there are some handy tips here on what constitutes a blog-worthy post and how to promote your blog or website.
8. The Slot – I make my living as a writer. Therefore, I get bothered when I see bad grammar online. This blog is about copy editing, that last look at the content to be certain all is well. Trust me, your content — and your expertise — will be much better received if your copy is correct.

There’s a lot more inspiration and resources out there, but these sites have been key for me so far, and I’m getting close to my site relaunch. I hope you’ll be back to see the new me. And I hope these help you out in your endeavors!

UPDATE: Bonus sites! Check these out too:

• A List Apart: For People Who Make Websites
• COLOURlovers: Color Trends + Palettes