Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [112]
Music
Musicians, both signed and unsigned, are finding Twitter an effective tool to build a fan base, connect more deeply to fans, and get the word out about their music. John Mayer (@JohnCMayer), Dave Matthews (@DaveJMatthews), Britney Spears (@BritneySpears), and P. Diddy (@iamdiddy) are among the most famous musicians twittering, but thousands of recording artists at all levels are making innovative use of it, including Twitter veterans Matthew Ebel (@MatthewEbel) and Samantha Murphy (@thehighwaygirl).
Fans find Twitter a great place to discover new music, as well — especially with tools such as Blip.fm around. (Blip.fm allows you to share your favorite songs with your followers on Twitter.)
Education
Teachers are starting to tweet their lessons. Students are tweeting questions about their homework. Schools are using Twitter to communicate with their communities, quickly getting out information and cutting down on the cost of mailings. Conference attendees share insights and links from the conference, creating a virtual community for remote colleagues. Classes with a Twitter-fueled back channel (ideas, observations, questions, and comments coming from the audience) have been taught at colleges and universities around the world, including the esteemed Harvard Business and Law Schools.
Charities and Causes
Charities and causes find Twitter an easy way to get word out about their passions. You can even use Twitter to give microdonations to your favorite charity. The charity Social Media for Social Change (@SM4SC) exists only because of people who came together on Twitter. People use Twitter to raise awareness and money for a wide variety of international causes and charities. The ease of use makes it appealing to many agencies and groups.
Event Planning
The immediacy and reach Twitter allows can really help you get your next conference, party, or social-networking event off the ground. You can find everything you need, right in your Twitter stream. You can manage events on Facebook using a custom application within the platform, pulling tweets right into the launch page. You can even update both at once with TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop. Twitter is also integrated with other event planning Web sites, such as EventBrite, allowing attendees to find and follow each other before and after the event itself.
Glossary
AFAIK: Abbreviation of As Far as I Know.
bot: An account run by an automated program. You can find good bots, such as the ones that pull in all breaking news headlines from a media outlet. But you also can find bad bots, which put out only generic tweets, usually filled with links to Internet marketing sites or porn. You can often spot these bots by a generic “hot chick” avatar or their uneven follower/following ratio (meaning that they’re following hundreds or thousands of people but have only a few following them back).
DIAF: Abbreviation of Die in a Fire; expresses extreme anger with a person or about an idea.
direct messages: Private messages sent to specific Twitter users in your network (abbreviated DMs).
dweet: A tweet sent while under the influence. Drunken tweeting can be amusing for your Twitter stream, but it can have lasting consequences for you because Google indexes all tweets. Be careful with dweeting!
early adopter: The enthusiastic people, often closely tied to the Silicon Valley digital-media community, who tend to be the first to use a new gadget or technology. Twitter’s early adopters, for example, are the ones who joined before or during the SXSW (South by Southwest) conference in March 2007, when Twitter made its first big splash.
FailWhale: The image of a cartoon whale that appears when you try to load a page on the Twitter.com domain when the domain’s servers are overloaded. In Twitter’s early days, the tiny startup was known for unreliability because its rapid growth had outpaced its server power. Back then, the FailWhale made an appearance as often as several times a day, and many Twitter users casually use the expression FailWhale to show disapproval