social network

Still Wondering About Twitter – Check Out A Local Tweet-Up

August 3, 2009 by gisuser

By now you’re likely very familiar with Twitter, although you may still be wondering, why should Twitter matter to me or my business? Indeed valid questions and Twitter may or may not be of use to your business workflows, however, given the hype surrounding the “TwitterSphere” there’s no arguing that you can’t simply blow it off without some level of investigation… enter the Tweet-Up.

A Tweet-Up is typically a cozy, local event that brings together Twitter users for some face-to-face discussion… no 140 character limit here! Many Twitter users are connected with people scattered all over the World, however, if you Tweet, you will no doubt eventually become connected with some local people that live and work in your community. A tweet-up provides you with the opportunity to mingle with some locals and to try and get a feel for how, why, and where other people Twitter. If Twittering is something that your still on the fence about, I suggest you consider attending a local Tweet-up (or a local social media event) where you can meet others just like you and get some questions answered.

Just last week I attended a small tweet-up event where several of us got together and shared a couple of beers along with some stories about how social media is being implemented in our business processes. I may not have met any other GIS professionals, however, I did connect with a PR professionals, met a new open source and mobile developer/programmer, picked the brain of a newbie Twitter user and facebook junkie, and made a good connection with the manager of a local hotel… you never know who you’ll meet and how you might take advantage of these connections in the future.

A side-note.. last month at the ESRI UC in San Diego I organized and attended my first Tweet-Up and had a great time meeting some very cool Geo-Tweeters… I suggest you give it a try yourself some time, perhaps at a future GIS event! You can follow yours truly on Twitter @gletham or @gisuser

Setting up Corporate Twitter messaging or a Team Twitter

June 2, 2009 by gisuser

Twitter has many uses and is valuable to many users in many different ways. Once great use of Twitter is to use it for quick, convenient messaging for a team or corporate use. Imagine a team of developers spread out all over the country or perhaps a baseball team that needs to get notices about a rain-out or change in game time etc… consider a team Twitter account. Here’s all you need to do:

First, create a team account (@yourteamname) – Important, when creating this account you will want to set the Protect Updates Option (unless you want the World to see your notices!) See Settings / Account / Protect my Updates (last option on page) – you may or may not want to setup an auto-follow option so this team account will automatically Follow back anyone who follows

For a “closed” or protected Twitter account be sure to select the Protect my updates option in account settings

Next, you’ll want your team members to be made aware of the account and then have them follow it. A simple email to your team will work well as you are likely already spending loads of valuable time swapping emails around!

The rest of the work is up to the people that will follow the Team Twitter account

For the followers (team members) I suggest you enable mobile updates – see Settings / Devices and set updates to On – this will enable users to receive mobile updates from select users.

Receiving mobile alerts of Direct messages is very handy although may be tough to manage for people who follow lots of Twitter users (spammers and auto followers are runing this!)

Then, optionally enable email messaging when you are sent a Direct message (always a good back-up plan)

Finally, now that the team members are following the Master Team account, members will want to enable device updates from that specific Twitter account. Simply make sure you are already following the team account, then go to their Twitter page (e.g. http://twitter.com/gisuser) and notice just under the Twitter user icon there’s an option to enable Device updates – set that to ON

That’s it… if everyone follows these steps correctly (savvy Twitter users should have no problem understanding this) now, when the Team Manager posts a Tweet, all team members following the Twitter account (recall, this is a protected Twitter account) will receive a text message containing the Tweet.