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Posts Tagged ‘Twitters’

• @somdfishing Also following you as CGAUXDrumPoint. The area needed a GREAT fishing blog. in reply to somdfishing #
• @livedesk No. We have seen only higher property taxes and increased sales tax in Maryland. School budgets and state budgets up not down. in reply to livedesk #

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You can follow me on Twitter at @popwireless.

There are a few things about Twitter that helps make the service useful for me. I tend to seek out and follow persons and companies that have meaningful tweets.  Twitter becomes too noisy with too many Twitters to keep up with.  These are the things I think about before selecting to follow someone also following me. I wish more folks published a similar Twitterer About page like this so it would be easier to get to know those who follow me.

1. I generally block Internet marketing gurus. There are too many of you and I have no desire to pay anyone for this type of service.  When I follow such folks I select movers and shakers of the WordPress world that offer helpful insights that help me refine my own expertise. I’ve been on the Internet since 1995 – virtually since the beginning and on FidoNet before that. Having worked in the consumer software industry for a time and among marketing folks I learned enough to keep me going with my own sites. Don’t take it personally if I elect not to follow you.

2. When I look at the Twitter page of a new follower I try to determine who they are why they would  want to follow me.  Based on that, I decide whether I want to add their Twitters to the long list of stuff I read each day. When I cannot determine who the person is I either block the ID or don’t follow it. When I don’t block or follow I occasionally look a follower’s page.

When a Twitter ID has no URL or personal information associated with it I usually ignore it and sometimes block it.

When a follower’s tweets are mostly replies (nothing too original), conversations with friends and family (and I don’t know you or your family), or marketing hype, or product information I have no interest in I will either block or not follow you. Quite a few people marketing products follow anyone with a keywords drilled from my tweets. They should improve their marketing analysis technique.

3.   When you are angry with a moderator on the PopularWireless BBS don’t follow me to harass me. Immediate block.

4. Don’t be creepy <shudder.>  An unknown person with an odd Twitter ID followed me. There was no identifying information, no URL, no background, no photo, nothing to tell me who this person was.  I was also the ONLY person they were following. Creepy. Immediate block.

5. Use a reply tweet to alert me you are following and why. Persons interested in following posts from my blogs are certainly welcome. I suggest using FeedBurner however. That way you won’t miss anything.

6. There are some magazines and vendors of interest to me that use Twitter wisely. West Marine is one of those so I follow them. The person at the other end is Internet wise and not just a marketing professional. Put someone like that in charge of your Twitter feed to increase followers.

7. Twitter is more of an information source than a social tool for me. I find people get tired of reading tweets directed at one person. Imagine sending out a reply to a family member when you have thousands of followers. As a Fan” tool this makes sense from a marketing perspective but not for the average person. I send a few Tweets like this but may use a direct message to those that I follow rather than use a regular Tweet.

8. While I am a conservative, I am NOT a hater, a racist, a sexist, a militia member, a paranoid freak, conspiracy theorist, or a threat to my country. Fascists, whacks, and creeps with a distorted view of patriotism on the right or the left are blocked – immediately.

9.  I like to follow people who share a common interest but I can still be choosy simply because while also following @FOXNEWS I just don’t have time to read all the Tweets. My interests:

a. Political pundits.

b. Wise, clear thinking people.

c. Catholic groups and people.

d. Coast Guard  groups and people. (Guardians rock!)

e. WordPress folks.

f. Other great blogs that I read like @EyeOnAnnapolis

g. Blogs I want to keep tabs on while researching a topic.

h. Manufacturers of stuff that I own.

i. Maritime Twitterers. Newsy blogs, information sources, great vendors, cool products. I don’t sail. My boating is limited to crew trainee experience in the CG Auxiliary.

j. Wireless stuff. My blog PopularWireless publishes stories from around the Internet. If you want me to notice your wireless stuff let me know by email at edtor at popularwireless.com. Send press-release or use a Twitter reply to send me a link.

k. Some Amateur Radio hobby stuff. I’m not as active as I used to be after some thirty years. My gear hasn’t been turned on since last October.

l.  GMRS related stuff.

m.  PRA members in good standing.

n.  My family.

o.  Genealogy stuff.

p. ICS (Incident Command System) and NIMS topics.

q. Maryland CERT

r. FEMA, MEMA, DHS, RED CROSS stuff.

s. Friends, pals, parrot lovers.

t. Local Republican, Libertarian, or Independent politicians. (Unless you advocate legalizing drugs, abortion etc)

u. Twitters with a local interest (Maryland, Southern Maryland)

v. H1N1

w. Maryland bloggers.

x. Calvert County Twitters

y. Anti-Graffiti topics

So if you are only following me to promote a product or service that I have no interest in I will either not follow you or block you. Spammers are always blocked and reported to @spam.

I also use TweetDeck and TweetWorks. Has tags I follow include #tcot, #MDcon, #MDrep, #WordPress

I follow news on Twitter because I receive news from the big news agencies like Fox News as the news happens. Locally Southern Maryland Online and Calvertnews.info are also on Twitter. Important local stories are zapped to my computer screen thanks to Twitter and the TweetDeck application. Twitter is becoming a local media tool!

I was not pleased to suddenly find my Twitter account being followed by yet another SEO expert, a free laptop scheme, a mortgage company masquerading as a happy teenager. Then there was the happiness guru, the sales advice guru. Blecch. The social media marketer is the brown colored goo in pond scum. The only way to get rid of it is to clean the pond and in the case of Twitter maintaining my account so that sleaze is blocked the moment it floats in.

Twitter has real-time usefulness. There are people that I respect, admire, and enjoy reading about or listening to. Following them on Twitter keeps me up to date. TweetDeck lives on one monitor while I work in another. I’m up to date with Drudge and FoxNews, getting the latest WordPress tip from Lorelle, getting updates from my sisters, and monitoring emergency providers, and news of the Coast guard through various feeds. What I do not and never expected to do with Twitter was accept it as a method of being introduced to mortgage rates, free laptop deals, MLM, consultants of various types fishing for business, or an SEO service from a company I would never recognize.

Twitter fulfills a need for specific information and a need to stay in touch real-time with family, people, companies, writers, political champions, news companies, and emergency service providers. Sales and marketing social media spammers are intruding in that space.

Before I have an unmanageable account I look at my list of followers. I block people whose personal URL turns out to be a sleazy marketing or sales website. The tweets of these folks are almost all universally contrived. So many of these tweets are in very poor English suggesting to me that the source is an off-shore company specializing in social-media spam. We may never know the real source.

Twitter allows you to report spammers via direct message to user SPAM. When I block a spammer I also report them. Other Twitter users should do the same. Doing this sooner rather than later will help Twitter and other Twitter users. I’m also reading a search on the word SPAM just to see what people are talking about and /or how they are dealing with spam.

Don’t let a spammer follow you on Twitter. Block them.

The PenguinSix Blog also here in Calvert County wrote about TweetDeck, a PC based interface for Twitter messages. The author is a technically savvy guy so I went to the TweetDeck site and downloaded the program. Until now I was using the simple website interface for Twitter. Since downloading TweetDeck I only go back to the website to see who is following me and to search for new Twitterers I want to follow.

TweetDeck runs in the background and checks the Twitter site for the latest Tweets. When new Tweets are downloaded a polite low-level bird noise comes from the computer speakers. There are three columns to the interface, All Friends, Replies, and Direct Messages. The three types of tweets are separated into columns that are easy to read. I can leave TweetDeck running on one computer monitor and work using the other. You need two monitors on a PC to truly enjoy using a computer.

The TweetDeck interface also includes a big box at the top of the program window to type in your Tweets, replies, and direct messages. A convenient box also allows you to shorten a URL using the bit.ly service. The box counts your characters so you don’t exceed the maximum allowed.

The user interface, UI is intuitive. Anyone can figure it out very quickly. Whether you are new to Twitter or an old salt I think you will like TweetDeck.