Social Media « shoqvalue.com

Welcome to Twitter! It's about time you got here.

This primer has some tips and resources you'll need to get oriented. There are trillions of tutorials available on Twitter, many of them pretty poor. Twitter's own help pages are among the worst of them. But there are some adequate sites and pages, ranging from this brief overview style, to the far more extensive, tutorial-about-everything style, such as Mashable's Guide To Twitter. Even the bad ones can still give you the basics.

Note: Twitter 101 For Business is probably better than most of their materials, and worth a look, even if you're not a business.

I suggest you glance at that one, but ignore the rest (for now). Just wander around, asking questions and endearing yourself to people by being clueless and vulnerable. Just bear these things in mind during your first week:

Tip 1: As in most of life, most people don't know what they're talking about. Twitter has a LOT of those people, and many of them are probably advising you right now. Just send them away. Tell them, "go, I'll learn by stumble."
Tip 2: If you're a celebrity, like Tiger Woods's penis, I suggest you ignore the volume of people tweeting at you for a few weeks. Relax and spend time with a handful of friends and co-workers, and learn how to follow people and "feeds" at your leisure. It's easier than you think. Select one or two really skilled people and listen to them. This keeps you from being overwhelmed by too many tutors. But don't assume their habits are everyone's habits, and never assume they understand even 1% of what Twitter is about. They don't. And you won't either, for a long time—if ever. Use your desktop and a program like Tweetdeck. Don't try to absorb all the culture and tricks on a tiny mobile interface. Spread out.
Tip 3: If you're a liberal minded person, politically, the Progressive community is your friend here. You'll find many of us on the #p2 tag. You can read about what the #p2 tag is here. Whenever you see it, a progressive is tweeting out to the progressive community, or some wingnut is spamming the tag and probably calling you a socialist fag. If you're unlucky, these same conservative hatriots can often be seen using their own "#tcot" tag (and others like it). These "#hashtag" codes are just little identifiers for what people are talking about. It's very informal and primitive, but it works. Clicking on tags will show you the "conversations" (the tweets) happening at those tags.

Try it. Click #p2 for filthy commie libs, or #tcot for screaming Beck fans who want all liberals to be sent to Super Max concentration camps.

If you're a conservative minded person, my only tip is this: Facebook.
Tip 4: Follow people you can trust to follow people worth following. But don't stick to your bubble pals (the friend of friends who probably dragged you to Twitter). Pick people you know are interested in diverse issues and ideas. They come upon the most interesting things to know of at any given time. Beware of your own natural tendency to cluster and nest with only people you know.Twitter is about discovery of people and ideas. The best of those are often outside our comfort zones.
Tip 5: Don't be a dork. Especially if you're famous. if someone passes you a tip, or a resource, or an idea, at least tweet a simple thank you. You don't have to know everyone's name, or that their grandma's dog just died. But try and explore the very personal exchanges and relationships you can have and enjoy here. You just don't know it yet.
Tip 6: Just ask your feed how to do things. Example: "@shoq, what the hell is "new retweet;" "What's a hat tip?" "How do I start juicy rumors about @pressSec and @kimKardashian?"

That's it. You'll pick it all up from here.

Most of all. Enjoy it. Yes, it's a brave new world, but it's also an interesting and fun one.

Clients You'll Want

Client programs take social media to a new level not usually found on the web verisons of many applications Nobody you like uses the Twitter.com website to access Twitter:

Tweetdeck (makes Twitter MUCH easier). . Tweetdeck is where you want to be, to start. There are many other programs, but they all work similarly.
Hootsuite — gets better all the time. Tweetdeck is still what I use, as I find it closest to the user experience that I think should be the bare minimum in today's social media ecosystem.

Resources You'll Want

Verify Your Twitter Account — Very important. Celebrities and people important to Twitter can get it done. Just ask your staff to follow instructions. We little people have to suck it.

Basic Twitter Terms You Must Know

What is Twitter "Blocking"

How to get started with-twitter — As stated above, just one of many tutorials. One is just about as good as another at the start. Get the key ideas; learn by doing.

Twitter Help

Twitter FAQ
Getting Started
The Official Twitter Glossary —Limited, but good for basics.
Twitter Rules And Best Practices
Twitter 101 For Business

Top 50 Twitter Acronyms, Abbreviations and Initialisms by @digiphile — A very good guide by a saavy social media thought leader.

Shoq's Tips — A number of things you won't find easily. Including tricky issues like New Retweet vs. Old Retweet, etc.

What does #FF or "#Follow Friday" mean? — Since Friday is your first full day, you're about to find out. It's not one of Twitter's finer traditions. Read about it here.

Twictionary.com — All the lingo in one place. Not for the squeamish.

Hashtags.org — A dictionary of tags (best picked up by just watching and asking)

Journalists on Twitter — A decent, if not exhaustive directory of people you will surely be interested in. Remember, there's far more insight and ideas than what come across in any one community.

Directory of Twitter Lists — Lists are a great way to follow the tweets of many people in various interest areas, without actually following individuals. You just follow the list, and browse the tweets of the people in them.

WeFollow.com —A General Twitter Directory

Tweetprogress.us — The Progressive Community on Twitter. Hardly definitive, but most of the leaders and core people are there.

About Gametags — Which are an amusing way to waste hours of time creating completely silly, often riotously funny, poignant, or humiliating tweets about breaking news, or really dumb or annoying people and events.

How To Verify A Tweet — Useful for Journalists, or anyone trying to confirm the veracity of a Tweet on a fact or news story.

Note: This page will change often. If you are referring it to friends, please ask them to check back often. If you feel it needs new concepts or resources, please post a comment.

As always, using the Retweet button below will expose this page others.

Typical of conservatives, the minute their values are impacted—the moment THEY are personally impacted—the first thing they do is dive for the cover of victim status, and DEMAND someone (government?) DO SOMETHING!

Pastebin Document by #Tcot Warrior @GregWHoward

Twitter bills itself as “without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is happening right now.” However, it is rapidly becoming the best place to cyberbully, post pornography, and engage in the nastiest and most vulgar speech possible, all with impunity. Despite growing protests from long-established users, Twitter continues to officially turn a deaf ear to the growing outrage.

Read every delicious drop of hysteria from this "White" knight

It is not that there are not valid concerns some might have about content—particularly where children are present on the net. But it's the sheer cluelessness in his screed about an entire history of censorship, liberties, and the slippery slopes that are ensured the very moment we start talking about anyone deciding what is and isn't appropriate. Such "TOS" rules were always ruinous on most services, and it's the very freedom of twitter—even it's anarchic freedoms—that we were just praising last year in Iran (and many are trying to crush in China).

What's he's asking for is the 2001 version of AOL: An army of tweet nanny's in Mumbai, who will decide what little Muffy and Conner can hear today. And a few of them might even stop liberals from calling him a wussy.

Most of the time, this guy is running around Twitter spewing arch conservative Beckisms that just make me cringe. But he's really outdone himself here. And it's so typical of what these modern angry conservative men are about. Control. Of everyone and every thing but their own wretched little lives.

UPDATE1 (4/4/2010): I have it from a pretty reliable source that David Shuster has NOT been fired (as of this writing, anyway). And his bio has NOT been removed, as some had claimed. His "blog" may have been removed, but that could have been due to some unrelated issue. His MSNBC bio page is still there.

With a few notable exceptions, I've always been a fan of David Shuster. I like his boyish enthusiasm as he tears into the leg of any guest he knows is full of shit. After some exchanges with him over the past few months, I can't say I'd be very surprised if he was in fact on the way out at MSNBC, but I've yet to see any hard evidence that this actually happened.

It's mostly a lot of supposition based on this New York Observer story.

Inside the CNN Stockroom: Network Recently Shot Pilot Staring MSNBC's Shuster and NPR's Martin

Recently, according to CNN sources, the network's in-house team shot a pilot for a news show featuring David Shuster of MSNBC and Michel Martin of NPR as co-anchors.

The NY Times Brian Stelter gets on board, and adds..

“If true, this is unacceptable and David will be punished appropriately,” an MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, said Friday afternoon"

Then Mediaite steps up to fan the gossip wires

And in the short term – he’s not anchoring at 3pmET. Shuster has already been trouble with MSNBC for his inappropriate tweeting, and hasn’t used Twitter for months. … An NBC insider tells Mediaite, “Shuster has never been a major player at MSNBC.”

Bringing up the rear, the ever faithful Wingnut Daily, Newsbusters, couldn't pass up a chance to bust General Soros for trying to buy another foot soldier for his Communist News Network (owned by one of the largest media conglomerates on the planet).

Shuster's Twitter account has been silent since January 27, when NewsBusters and other center-right blogs documented his blatant conflict of interest in covering O'Keefe's arrest. Ironically, his last Tweet cites a post from the far-left group Media Matters. Need we say more?

An uncertain period of time after the Observer story dropped, Shuster's website at MSNBC up and vanished. Hmmm….

So there we have it. On the surface, a lot of hearsay and supposition based on an anonymous "CNN source" that reported a "pilot" that may or may not have happened; that Shuster missed his shows; that there had been prior friction between Shuster and MSNBC; and that a web page disappeared.

But that's all we know. It's certainly a compelling sequence, but hardly conclusive. It's mostly interesting to me because it illustrates how our new blogger-centric world can play a story in incremental steps, from many bloggers, each with their own world (and industry) view.

Perhaps David is toast, or perhaps his dog got hit by a car and someone edited his page and broke it. Nobody has made any statements on the record—or supplied any evidence—that says anything to the contrary.

My gut says it's probably true. But mostly because I'd like it to be true. Especially that part about NPR's Michel Martin going to CNN.

In my view, she's one of the best broadcast journalists working today. If CNN wants me as a viewer again, she'd bring me over in any time slot.

Good luck, Shuster, wherever you are, and wherever you go (or not).