Here is a quick overview of Twitter and three tips to get you started. The best way to do this is share with you three great blog posts by some of the best tweeters in the industry (I’ll save the review of the Droid for another post).

Getting Started with Twitter.

The Twitter page explains…

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Thomas Nelson Publishing CEO, Michael Hyatt has a great beginners guide to Twitter. He wrote it for a friend, but it’s simple objective may help you get started. Michael’s post starts out…

I thought, I wish I had a simple, step-by-step guide to give him. It doesn’t take long to get set-up with Twitter, but it helps if you know the basics. So, I decided to document these eight basic steps:

He lists out eight basic steps to get you going.

1. Set up your account.
2. Tweak your settings.
3. Set up your phone.
4. Follow some family or friends.
5. Learn the basic commands.
6. Start Twittering.
7. Be careful.
8. Consider third party apps.

I found Michael’s guide refreshingly simple. While it is based on using a text based cell phone, it is easily modifiable to smart phones like the iPhone or Droid. Once you get the hang of Twitter you may want to find a way to reach out to your followers in a scheduled and orderly manner That is where Nik-Nik comes in..

Setting up a Tweet Plan

If you have been on Twitter very long and followed anyone of stature in the Twitter universe, you’ll quickly conclude from the volume of their tweets that they don’t have a life or they use some type of software to deliver their messages throughout the day.

Blogger and Real Estate tech pro Nicole Nicolay, has put together a simple guide to help you reach out to your tweet readers in a scheduled and orderly manner.

Her four step tweet plan includes

1. Start a Tweet Topic List
2. Identify Your Resources
3. Schedule Your Drip Tweets
4. Supplement with Spontaneous Tweets

Her plan is easy to setup and is intended to help you become a “Trusted Advisor” to your intended audience. I really like her plan as it provides useful content along with spontaneous messages. This will separate you from the “what I had for breakfast etc. noise” on Twitter.

So now you are tweeting and providing useful content to your followers but there is another step to take. One that can help you…

Become a Public Celebrity

Dwayne Melancon, world traveler and airport tweeter, has a great blog post about taking social media to a new level, where you the content provider becomes an actual celebrity.

Based on the book, Celebritize Yourself by Marsha Friedman, Dwayne’s post and review is a great look into the world of becoming a Local or Public Celebrity. His review covers the use of social media and also delves into writing a book and publishing articles.

Dwayne shows how Twitter, with it’s timely and local access, can help you reach out to the world or just to a group of local friends.

Having followed Dwayne’s, Genuine Curiosity blog for years, it was great to see that Dwayne took Marsha’s advice and is now writing a book. It’s also refreshing to see how Dwayne included his Twitter feed on the right hand sidebar of his blog.

**********

As you get started with Twitter, be sure to follow these great twitter links from above to help you get great content on a daily basis. Be sure to leave a comment and your twitter links for all of us to follow.

Michael Hyatt

Nicole Nicolay

Dwayne Melancon

Success2you

**********

BTW… I took Marsha’s advice a year ago a wrote a book that you can find here.

When you first start using Twitter, you might have noticed that many of the tweets you receive have a hash mark # in front of a word. The hash mark combined with a word creates a hashtag.

Hashtags are popular acronyms or words that anyone on twitter can use to follow topics of interest to them. A hashtag starts with a # and then any word or combination of letters follows. A hashtag cannot have any spaces so multiple words must be combined together.

Hashtags are a way to catalog and connect tweets about a specific topic. They make it easier for users to find new tweets on a particular subject, while providing a filter for the attendant tweets that may contain the same keyword.

Hashtags are also often used by a conference or event organizers as a method of keeping all tweets about the event in a single flow. They have also been used to coordinate updates during emergencies or news events.

Some popular hashtags for people interested in personal development are

#success

#inspirational

#leadership

#quote

#personaldevelopment

#organization

#productivity

#timemanagement

People looking for a job might try

#jobs

#employ

#employment

#hiring

# with the city you are looking for a job in

People interested in goal setting might want to search for

#goals

#goalsetting

Other popular hashtags are

#news

#tech

#music

There are even sites dedicated to searching for hashtags

http://www.whatthetrend.com/

http://twubs.com/

There are even books that can help you use them more effectively.

The Twitter Book

Why not spend a few minutes today searching for hashtags that interest you. Or make up your own unique ones. When using Twitter, the hashtag will help you find what you are looking for quickly and easily.

But when I tried to setup a paper or electronic solution I found that most organizational systems just didn’t work for me. The Covey solution required too much time to figure out individual priorities, the next actions of David Allen were clunky in Outlook, and Julie’s Time Map solution was a little difficult to setup.

Yet each system had some really good points. So I took the best strategies from each solution and created a Top-Six Daily Planning Sheet. The sheet is quick to use and has places for all of your daily activities.

It Includes..

1. The Top Six Daily Priority Boxes

2. Sidebar Boxes for Email, Phone Calls, Meetings, and Planning

3. A Step by Step To-Do list

4. A Place for Daily Goal Planning

5. A Place to Capture After Hour Activities

Here is how it works…

The way I use the sheet is to print a new one each morning. I then take a pen and write down my top priorities for the day. Sometimes I only have a few and sometimes I will fill in all six. Under each priority, I usually jot down a next-action.

As I open email and throughout the day, I’ll write down people that I need to email back in the email section. I do the same thing with voicemail and phone calls. I usually write down any meetings or appointments in the meeting box.

Once I have the basic information filled out, I’ll create a simple to do list. It’s real easy to do when you have your top priorities right in front of you. With the next actions listed, it’s easy to get started.

Strategies For Setting Priorities.

1. Ask yourself six things that you want/must to get done by the end of the day. Make sure they are truly important, not just urgent.
2. If you are a motivated type person, list your hardest task first. The rest of the day will just get easier.
3. If you find it hard to get going, list an easy task first. Do it first thing. This will get you moving and make it easy to check off your first box.
4. Check off your priorities as you complete them. This will motivate you to go on.
4. List your after work activities like exercise in the after hours box.

Download instructions:

The Top-Six Daily Planner is a free download. The zip file includes a MS publisher version that you can modify and a PDF version that you can use without any additional software.

Additional Information:

At the end of each day, store your daily planner sheet in a three ring notebook. As the days go by, this will create a daily journal of your activities that you can easily refer back to.

The books listed above have a myriad of good organization and planning ideas. Using this sheet along with these strategies will help you get more done and maybe even help you go home earlier.

Given that group think can be beneficial, a great way to research a product or service is to use the immediate feedback of Twitter to help you access a very vocal crowd.

You can do this in a couple of ways.

The first way is to use Twitter Search to find keywords about your individual item.

Twitter has a great search feature that lets you filter by attitude to find positive reviews and negative reviews by using the happy or sad face characters.You can use a question mark to filter for results that ask a question.

If you want to exclude a term from your results just use a minus sign in front of the term.

Using search may give you reasonable results but for real feedback you may want to ask your followers a specific question and see their answers.

New York Times author David Pogue has a great article today on the subject of Crowdsourcing. He asked his Twitter followers for their best tech-product enhancement ideas. The results were quick, to the point, and very revealing.

After reading David’s article it became apparent that using Twitter may be the fastest way to find out what people think about a product or service. Imagine almost instantaneous feedback on the latest gadget right at your fingertips. This is the power of Twitter.

Here are five Twitter specific filters that you can apply to your results to help you find exactly what you are looking for.

1. Search phrase with location: use this powerful locator to find key words that were sent near a specific location. Here are three examples.

“real estate deals” near:phoenix

“happy hour” near:boston

“garage sales” near:seattle

2. Search phrase with location and distance limiter: If you get too many results with the locater search above, add a distance limiter.

“garage sales” near:temecula within:15mi

3. Use a minus sign as an exclusion limiter in a search and add a happy or sad face filter for the attitude of the post. Here are a couple of examples.

movie –scary

movie –disney

4. Use a question mark filter to find tweets asking a question about an item.

traffic ?

toyota ?

mcdonalds ?

5. Use the from: or to: filters to find tweets sent from a sender or to a sender. You can easily find all your own tweets this way.

to:oprah

from:lancearmstrong

*************************

These are just a few of the popular filters you can use with Twitter search to limit a vast number of tweets and find the best match. Experiment with some of these and you’ll find surprising results.

What sets Twitter apart from its competition is its timeliness. Thousands of people are sending tweets at any given time about everything imaginable. It’s this live data that can be incredibly useful. If you search on Google, the results may be weeks, months, or years old. With Twitter Search, you’ve can get results that have been posted literally seconds ago.

This speed lends itself to many different applications. I’ve listed six popular ones below.

1. The Job Market: In this trying economy, many people have found themselves out of work and searching for a job. With over 10% unemployment in many areas, the competition for jobs is intense. Here is where Twitter can give you an edge. Many employers and job search firms are now posting job leads on Twitter. You can easily search by company name, job title, duties, or location.

I did a couple of job searches in my local Temecula area and found quite a few listing links. The interesting thing was many of the posts were filled quickly. The speed of Twitter may give you the jump on the competition and also alert you of upcoming corporate job fairs. It also may be a place to tweet about your expertise. Tweeting “Web Designer Temecula” with a link to your online resume on LinkedIn, may bring business right to your door.

2. Real Estate Listings: With all the foreclosures and short sales in the Real estate market, buyers have found themselves competing with literally hundreds of other buyers to find low cost properties. It’s not uncommon to see 20-30 offers on one house.

In talking with some friends in the business, it is imperative to be quick on your feet to get the good deals. This is where Twitter comes in. If you follow the local market and agents on Twitter, you can be informed within minutes of new listings. If you are pre-qualified you may have a great chance of getting accepted for a property before anyone else knows about it. Twitter is also a great place to see how your local market is trending.

3. The Stock Market: With Wall Street and the economy going through intense volatility in the last year, it’s really important to have timely news about a company before investing. Twitter gives you a great way to find out the up to the minute news on the market as well as most company stocks.

Lets say you are interested in investing in Apple computer stock. Just type in the ticker for Apple, AAPL into Twitter search. When I did this today, I found out a lot of interesting things. I found out how the stack was performing and I found links to upcoming products and applications. With a rumored Apple netbook in the works as well as a Facebook application for the iPhone coming soon, it seemed to me that Apple is still on the cutting edge in technology. This timely investment knowledge can be crucial to making smart investment decisions.

4. Sports: Want to know the latest sports scores? Twitter is the place to be. Whether it is a home run or a hole in one, you’ll know about it quicker on Twitter that just about anywhere else. The cool thing is, Twitter search can find those links quick… and for teams or players that may not be broadcasting on any other medium.

Whether it’s Tiger Woods, Dale Earnhardt, or your local triple A baseball player, you’ll find keyword searches will bring up fans that are tweeting live from the game on their cell phones. Not only will you know the score, but you’ll find live fan reviews and outlooks that you’ll get nowhere else.

5. Deals and Coupons: Interested in buying a domain name? Why not head over to GoDaddy and pick one up. But before you do, do a Twitter search for GoDaddy coupon codes. Twitter will help you find unexpired coupons for domain names as well as thousands of other products.

Since coupons expire quickly, Twitter may be your best resource for these money saving items. Before you buy, do a coupon search and potentially save yourself a lot of money.

6. Tech Reviews & Problems: Want to buy a new laptop? Type the brand or model number into Twitter search. You’ll find pertinent links to reviews and potential problems. Buying a new car? Twitter can give you up to the minute deals at local dealers as well as information on recalls and manufacturer problems.

I’ve personally found Twitter search very helpful for technical software problems. Is your browser crashing since the latest upgrade? Search twitter for the browser name followed by the word crash. Thinking about new software? Why not search for reviews before you buy?

***********************

These are just some of the great uses for Twitter Search. As with any search results, you need to use common sense when evaluating search results.

To make it even more useful, when you do a search in Twitter, you’ll get a “Save This Search” link next to the results. Click on it and your search will be saved in your sidebar. Now you can search for that new job, stock pick, or sports score with just one click. Be sure to save Twitter Search in your browser favorites today.

Then I started reading how great Twitter was for business. Instead of tweeting about their cheeseburger lunch, people were tweeting about their jobs and careers. Marketing was happening and all sorts of business opportunities appeared overnight. Unfortunately this brought a lot of spam and a huge amount of multi-level-marketing offers.

Soon the noise increased and it seemed like everyone was using Twitter. It became the de-facto communication medium for some people. With the simple addition of a cell phone software program, people were tweeting on the golf course, baseball field, and even while sky diving. All sorts of uses were devised for this simple communication medium.

In Twitter, it’s easy to follow people. Just click on a follow link and you have their tweets listed in your twitter list. It’s real easy to get carried away with this and soon you have a constant stream of communication going on. It’s like watching a stock ticker. The more people you follow, the more noise you have, and the less value each tweet is.

I added a browser plug-in for Firefox, and now my tweets were displayed at the bottom of my browser as they came in. Talk about constant interruptions… every few seconds a new message. Blah, blah, blah… Some days I just turn it off. It is just too much noise.

So here I am six months later with some recommendations.

1. Follow a few good people. It is so easy to just add people, but you soon may find the noise unbearable especially from the twitter fanatics. I suggest finding thought leaders in fields that interest you. Make sure they are providing good content. Keep your list short. You’ll soon have a great and inspiring resource at your fingertips.

2. Link to good content. If you have a blog, website, or business link, use twitter as a way of getting new people to come to your site. Provide links to important and relevant content on your other web entities and you’ll increase your online traffic.

3. Use Twitter Search. This is really the power of Twitter. Using search you can find out the latest information quickly about almost any subject imaginable. This is a great way to find out about the latest software upgrade, baseball scores, and even great dinner recipes. The real power here is timeliness. With all the constant tweeting going on, you are apt to find out things much quicker here than on Google.

With the addition of good Twitter interface programs such as Tweetdeck, you can separate the good tweets from the bad. I would love to hear your comments on Twitter. Have you found interesting or helpful uses for it?

But what if we took our talents and gave them away? What if our focus was a community, or a problem that needed to be solved? What if we took a stand and came up with a creative solution instead of complaining?

So many of the world’s problems need a creative solution.

Old answers don’t work anymore.

We need people like the following three bloggers who will provide those creative answers.

Here are three examples of selfless creativity at work.

Rosa Say: Created the Ho’ohana community of bloggers over 4 years ago. Her selfless commitment to others has been her hallmark. She is an amazing leader with a focus on personal development. She was instrumental in the creation of Joyful-Jubilant-Learning, a blog dedicated to lifelong learning within a global values based community. Rosa has helped hundreds of people learn new things.

Liz Strauss: Created the SOB cafe for bloggers all over the world. SOB stands for Successful Outstanding Bloggers, and Liz has highlighted hundreds of them in her weekly spotlight. But Liz went even farther than her blog and created SOBCON, a yearly meet-up for bloggers from all genres. Her tireless enthusiasm for others sets her apart. Liz has helped hundreds of blogs to become visible in the online world.

Brian Clark: Created Copyblogger, a website about online copywriting. This site is chocked full of creative ideas about writing, blogging, and marketing. Brian has provided hundreds of powerful articles that can help you become more successful online. And he does it all without charging an admission fee. Brian truly cares about his 60,000 subscribers.

*********************

The world needs creative answers. Why not share yours today?

So how does a business get in touch with its mobile and off site users when cell phones are not available? Hmmm

1. You can ask the employee to give you their private cell number (good luck)

2. You can email them and hope they get the message (maybe hours later)

3. You can provide pagers at a lower cost than phones (still an ongoing cost)

4. You can call the remote office or site and leave messages (if they check in)

5. You can have them call in at predetermined times from other offices (lol)

As you can see, many businesses find themselves in a real communication dilemma. In our modern fast-paced world things need to happen fast. You can’t wait hours to get a hold of someone. In the technical world, techs and programmers often need to collaborate as a group. Communication is a must.

I propose a simple solution. Provide your employees with a wireless iPod Touch and use Twitter to communicate. As long as your remote offices have a wireless internet connection, you are good to go.

Have your employees create their own private group on Twitter and use one of the popular iPod Twitter apps for notification. Communication will be quick and easy and everyone in the group can see what is going on.

Since the iPod touch also works with Microsoft Exchange Email, you can send private messages to users via email.

Use Twitter for group communication…
Use email for one-on-one or private conversations…

This simple setup can save businesses with offsite techs or consultants thousands of dollars a year. Now that more and more locations offer wireless internet connections, the opportunity to use this fixed expense system is expanding.

Here is the choice… a fixed one time expense of $300 for an iPod Touch or $100/month for a cell phone with a data plan.

Group Twittering may just be the answer!

But what set her apart from the ordinary was her cooking. She was a master of simple ingredients. She could take ordinary flour, sugar, and other ingredients that you would find on any pantry shelf and create masterpieces. But there was one meal that stood above the rest. You knew you were in for a treat when Mo-Mo was making her Southern Fried Chicken.

I remember fondly one afternoon I was over at Mo-Mo’s after school and she was getting ready for my cousin’s family to come over for dinner. That day she taught me her secret. That day she taught me how to make magic.

She had me get down the heavy cast iron skillet. “To make chicken you have to use this pan,” she said. She had me get the chicken out of the refrigerator, separate the pieces, and put them on a large plate. Mo-Mo was picky about her chicken and even though she couldn’t get out of the house most days and go to the store, she always made sure that her favorite butcher at the store across the street would pick out the pieces and send them home.

On the plate she had me wet down the chicken just so and roll it in her flour, buttermilk, and spices mixture. She showed me how she did it and then had me do it. After a little practice, my pieces looked just like hers.

We then put the shortening in the pan and she turned on the flame. Then she told me another secret. “You have to get the oil at just the right temperature,” She said as she adjusted the flame down and tested the temperature of the oil by dropping water drops in and watching how they evaporated.

She then took her tongs and put the pieces in the pan one by one. She put them around the side of the pan and turned them over slowly. She had me set a timer and we turned the pieces in a rhythm until the pieces were golden brown and the timer went off. When the buzzer rang, we removed the pieces quickly one by one and served up an incredible dinner that night.

To this day there was nothing better than her fried chicken. It tasted so good and yet it was based on ordinary ingredients. She was able to take ordinary and make it extraordinary. She knew the secret.

In the public speaking organization Toastmasters, some people are like my Grandmother. They take simple words and stories and create masterpieces. Their 5 to 7 minute speeches are works of art. The secret is in the preparation.

Here is an analogy.

1. In public speaking you need a safe and encouraging environment to practice your speaking. Like the sturdiness of a cast iron frying pan, Toastmasters is that organization.

2. To prepare a speech, you need to start with quality ingredients and then prepare them just right. Preparing a speech takes time and effort. The ingredients of an award winning speech include powerful stories, spiced up with just the right words and metaphors. The facts and figures must be solid and you need to roll them together in powerful sentences and word pictures.

3. Those powerful words and stories then need to be immersed in the minds of an audience. Like the oil in the story above an audience needs to be “the right temperature” for best results. An easy way to do this is to meet with audience members before the speech and introduce yourself. It’s also helpful to have an emcee warm up the audience before it’s your turn to speak.

4. Just like the chicken, timing is of the essence in speaking. You need to turn from the speech opening, to the body, and finally to the close. And then you need to get out of the fire and sit down. Stay up in front of an audience too long and you’re sure to get burned.

A good speaker, just like a good cook, can take the simplest of ingredients and create magic. It just takes quality elements, proper preparation, and attention to detail.