Blogs | Social Signal

Tonight i stumbled across a website that promises to get you more than 20,000 followers. How? The same way that letter you got in grade 2 promised to make you $500 dollars.

What's wrong with this picture?

Whether you're an ambivalent Twitter newbie or a chronic tweeter in the throes of a growing addiction, your tweeting is going to take time that you're currently using for something else. Even if you're following our guide to effective tweeting in 5 minutes a week, those five minutes have to come from somewhere. So here are my suggestions for activities you can pare back on -- or give up entirely -- to make room for tweeting.

Some of my fondest memories involve wilderness - whether it's a campfire with my parents, a hike with Alex to a glacial lake, or watching my children gape in awe at a sunflower sea star in a Cortes Island tidal pool.

Now wonder, then, that one of our favourite projects in quite a while is The Big Wild: an online community where people can share stories, photos and video of their wilderness experiences, connect with others who share their passion for Canada's big wild spaces, and take action to preserve those places for future generations.

Asked on LinkedIn: "Blogs are a very good tool for consumers to evaluate prospective product or service providers. However, how can a business use blogs to its commercial advantage (i.e. gain valuable insight into customer behavior and satisfaction levels) while minimizing the risk of being unduly smeared by a minority of disgruntled customers or even competitor attacks?"

If you're new to Twitter, you want to quickly eliminate the five sure signs you're a Twitter newbie:

1. An empty user account with no tweets (see part 1 of our quickstart guide for 21 tweets that can help you avoid that fate!)
2. Following fewer than 20 people (Oprah, please take note!)
3. Having fewer than 30 people following you (Oprah, your 472,000 followers have got you covered on that one.)
4. Updating less than twice a week
5. Letting your feed peter out after an initial flurry of posts

Here are some quick ways you can follow people, attract followers, and keep your feed regularly updated -- all in less than five minutes a week. You read that right: five minutes!

Social media should be a no-brainer. After all, it's all about conversation and relationships - and in fact our conversational instincts can serve us well in blogging, podcasting, social networking and other social media channels.

Instinct alone, however, won't suffice. You need skills, knowledge and experience to succeed in social media – from tech chops, to the unique demands of various social media venues, to the social nuances of dealing with conflict between online antagonists.

Gillian Shaw pointed out a "Twitter squatter" to me last night -- Mel Lehan, the NDP candidate in our riding, who'd nabbed his name on Twitter but not actually posted anything. It's smarter than not squatting -- the last thing you'd want as a candidate is to see someone else posting in your name! -- but there is a better way.

If you need to stake a claim to your Twitter identity, but you don't know what to tweet about, here's an easy way to get your Tweeting underway. You don't need to look like the world's most longstanding Twitterer (after all, Oprah just started tweeting last week!), but an empty Twitter feed is just, well, a little forlorn.

So I've taken the liberty of writing your first 21 tweets for you. That's enough for you to post something once a day for the next three weeks...by which time you should have the hang of Twitter and know what kinds of things you want to say. If not, at least you'll look like you gave it a decent try.

Spring's starting to look better and better, with two great events landing on my calendar.

Digg, the site that lets users find and rate content from all over the web, recently introduced a new feature: the DiggBar. Contrary to what you might think, it isn't a place where you can drink away your memories of the commenting culture on Digg; instead, it's a combination URL shortener and frame from sites bookmarked in Digg.

Here, for example, is what SocialSignal.com looks like in the DiggBar: