For newbies out there who don’t quite know how to best put Twitter to use, and for those of you who aren’t using it yet but are wondering if the new web service is worth your time: This Guide is for You!

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a new social network/instant messaging mashup that’s being referred to as a micro-blogging tool. It allows users to send text updates (called “tweets”) to all their friends—from twitter.com, instant message (via AIM or MSN Messenger, for example), or even from a mobile phone. It’s like posting an instant blog post, but you’re forced to craft your message with a 140-character limit.

The site asks members “What are you doing?” Answers range from the mundane (“eating a burrito”) to the interesting, hilarious, and even useful (well, okay, once in a while). While some use the service merely to updates friends on their whereabouts and activities, many people are using it to promote their blogs, share valuable links, and otherwise brand themselves and their businesses online.

Below: The default Twitter profile page.

(Click image for larger view.)

Most web nerds like myself are saying Twitter will be big (like, Facebook big) over the next few years, but right now it’s still at the early adopter stage, which means it’s dominated by bloggers, web designers, and technologists. For many Twitterfolk, it has become a primary channel of communication over the last year (*read: easier to reach them via Twitter than via email). I’ve been able to get the attention of a few power users in the “Twitterverse” over the last few months, including great folks like Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki, and Chris Brogan, and I’ve even had some pretty decent exchanges with them! If you’re in the technology or internet industry and you’re not using Twitter yet, it is a MUST. What are you still reading this for? Run! Go! Right now!

What About Twitter for Business?

For the rest of us, the question is how does one effectively leverage Twitter for business or personal branding? If used properly, it can easily bring more readers into your camp. I’ve already built a pretty decent sized following myself (follow me here), using the service mostly to share helpful tips and links I find across the web and to promote my own writing. One cool function is that you can easily plug your “tweets” in to the sidebar on your own blog or into other social networks and share your updates with friends that aren’t already on Twitter. (See Twitter badges and WordPress plugins.)

Below: My Twitter replies from other users. Yes, you can
add your own crazy backgrounds too!

(Click image for larger view.)

The BBC and CNN are using it to broadcast breaking news. Companies like Whole Foods, Zappos, Dell, Cisco, Comcast, and more are using it to send updates to their customers. If you provide value, you’ll make fast friends. Aside from sharing my links and blog posts, I also use Twitter to search for people with questions about blogging and answer my clients’ questions about WordPress. If you use it wisely, Twitter can give you a platform to show off your expertise, cultivate a reputation as an authority in your field, and build a loyal following.

Here are 5 tips to go from Twitter Newbie to Twitter Ninja:

1. There are several third-party Twitter clients that will run on your desktop much like your instant messenger does, so you don’t have to be logged in at twitter.com, and they give you quick navigation and search tools at your fingertips. First of all, I would recommend that you lookup Twitter clients and find one that suits you. I use Twhirl (see image at right), which makes my experience much more like a chat client that I can easily turn on and off when I want to.
2. Learn how to us the @replies to send messages to other users, and learn how to use a URL-shortening service such as TinyURL or SnipUrl to condense long hyperlinks so you can fit them within your 140-character tweets. (Twhirl and most other Twitter clients have URL-shortening services built-in.)
3. If you’re a blogger or a social media freak like me, hook up your blog’s RSS feed and feeds from your bookmarking services (del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Google Reader…) to auto-publish to your Twitter account with Twitterfeed.com.
4. Subscribe to keywords if you want to monitor the larger discussion about certain topics across the whole Twitter network. This is how I find a lot of users asking about WordPress, and I just try to answer people’s questions when I can. I’ve made a lot of new friends this way and have even scored last-minute freelance gigs by answering strangers’ questions with helpful advice. (Watch Ed Dale’s awesome tutorial video “Become a Twitter Master with Twhirl” for more about @replies and subscribing to keywords within the Twhirl client!)
5. Once you’re used to how the rules work, check out Lee Odden’s list of Five New Twitter Tools You Should Know to help you find more new people to connect with on Twitter and expand your network.

Thanks for reading! Follow me on Twitter and send an @codymckibb to ask your WordPress and blogging-related questions!

Helpful Twitter Articles from Others:

• Why Twitter?
• 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners
• 9 Ways Twitter Made Guy Kawasaki’s Website Better
• Three Ways to Maximize Your Twitter Time for Networking, Marketing and Fun

photo credit: somefool (MatthewM)

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Tweet and Grow Rich: 5 Tips to Rock Your Business With Twitter

Anyone who was present for Steve Jobs’ keynote speech at this year’s Macworld conference in San Francisco (or anyone who watched online), in which he introduced the iPhone as a groundbreaking new product, knows how captivating a speaker the Apple CEO is. And anyone who saw the long lines in anticipation of the iPhone’s release date knows how effective the PR hype has been.

Communications coach Carmine Gallo recently wrote up a great critique of Jobs’ presentation, packed with some useful tips for the rest of us to improve our public speaking skills:

1. Build Tension. A good novelist doesn’t lay out the entire plot and conclusion on the first page of the book. He builds up to it. Jobs begins his presentation by reviewing the “revolutionary” products Apple has introduced. According to Jobs, “every once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything…Apple has been fortunate to introduce a few things into the world.” Jobs continues by describing the 1984 launch of the Macintosh as an event that “changed the entire computer industry.”
2. Stick to One Theme Per Slide. A brilliant designer once told me that effective presentation slides only have one message per slide. One slide, one key point. When Jobs introduced the “three revolutionary products” in the description above, he didn’t show one slide with three devices. When he spoke about each feature (a widescreen iPod, a mobile phone, and an Internet communicator), a slide would appear with an image of each feature.
3. Add Pizzazz to Your Delivery. Jobs modulates his vocal delivery to build up the excitement. When he opens his presentation by describing the revolutionary products Apple created in the past, his volume is low and he speaks slowly, almost in a reverential tone. His volume continues to build until his line, “Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” Be an electrifying speaker by varying the speed at which you speak and by raising and lowering your voice at the appropriate times.
4. Practice. Jobs makes presentations look effortless because he takes nothing for granted. Jobs is known to rehearse demonstrations for hours prior to launch events. I can name many high-profile chief executives who decide to wing it. It shows. It always amazes me that many business leaders spend tens of thousands of dollars on designing presentations, but next to no time actually rehearsing. I usually get the call after the speaker bombs. Don’t lose your audience. Rehearse a presentation out loud until you’ve nailed it.
5. Be Honest and Show Enthusiasm. If you believe that your particular product or service will change the world, then say so. Have fun with the content. During the iPhone launch, Jobs uses many adjectives to describe the new product, including “remarkable,” “revolutionary,” and “cool.” He jokes that the touch-screen features of the phone “work like magic…and boy have we patented it.”

[via: Steve Jobs' Greatest Presentation]

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: 5 Ways to Pitch Your Product Like Steve Jobs

Welcome, Consumerist readers, and all others. Thank you for taking a minute to stop by! Here is my list of complaints after Cingular suddenly dropped my calls for a month straight, refused to do anything about it, and I lost hundreds and hundreds of dollars as a freelancer. Please also take a minute to check out some of my other recent posts, like the Top Ten Life Tips from CEO and Business Guru Rajesh Setty. But without further ado, Ten Reasons Not to Do Business with Cingular:

1. They don’t honor contracts from the companies they’ve acquired. They have forced thousands of customers to purchase new equipment and pay new fees to join their network.

2. Their call center CSRs are very well-trained—at screwing you out of your money! No matter what problem I call with, they never fail to suggest I buy some new hardware or add-on service. And research shows that 2 out of 3 people have a difficult time saying no. Lord knows I hate having to say it, but I DO! ‘Cuz you ain’t getting another penny out of me!

3. Their customer service line is absolutely horrible, with one of those voice-recognition systems that doesn’t recognize voices very well. And you inevitably end up at the wrong office—the person on the other end of the line asks you for your damned account information all over again, and then wonders why the hell you ended up at their extension. And you are inevitably forwarded to another department. Can anyone say waste of your time and mine?

4. Anytime anything goes wrong with a piece of their hardware, they will NOT fix parts or offer you a replacement, they will try to make you buy brand new equipment. And if you still have a measly 2 months until your contract is up, you ain’t gettin’ a product discount! You’re paying retail. (Reason 4.5: those damned upgrades are just a method of getting you to sign your life over for another 2 years in exchange for a pitiful discount.)

5. They have a system of labeling customers by how profitable or unprofitable they are—and if you’re unprofitable, good luck getting any quality service, upgrades, or discounts. They actually are trying to force these individuals out of their contracts early.

6. When they “upgrade their technology” and their network no longer supports your 2- to 3-year-old phone (something I very firmly believe they do on purpose), they will NOT offer you a new phone that does work, so as to fulfill the remainder of their contract with you by providing satisfactory service. They will ask you to buy one from them.

7. Offices do not share information, thus if you call the emergency helpline on a Sunday, they will not give you a status update of what other offices are doing to fix your problem. Trust me—in essence, they are doing nothing.

8. Case specialists that the CEO’s office “assigns” to your account when you are experiencing difficulties with service may ignore your calls for weeks. (In case you want, here’s his address by the way so you can write and give Stan Sigman a piece of your mind.)

9. If you choose to leave the service because they are no longer providing it to you or any other issue where they have not held up their side of your contract (Cingular believes in one-sided contracts), they WILL try to charge you the $150 early-termination fee. Thanks!

10. They are part of the biggest telecommunications monopoly in the world—the whole AT&T/BellSouth/Cingular/SBC family of companies. Ever since the FCC broke up Bell for aggregating this exact same way, these telecoms have been merging and buying each other up again. You think a company that brings in a thousand new customers a day cares about your problems?

11. Bonus! This one’s a kicker. The ads I see everywhere that say “least dropped calls”? Pure BS marketing. I’ll just let Wikipedia explain:

During the first quarter of 2006, Telephia reported that during an extensive nationwide test of major wireless carriers, Cingular Wireless dropped the fewest number of calls across the country. Cingular in turn began advertising with more aggression the “Allover Network” citing Telephia as “the leading independent research company.” This was in stark contrast to the Consumer Unions published “Consumer Reports” which slammed Cingular for static and dropped calls and J.D. Power and Associates’ findings. (J.D. Power and Associates consistently puts Cingular in the bottom (or near the bottom) of their “overall customer satisfaction” list.)

Telephia initially refused to provide details on its study, and a spokesman for the company has said, according to the Boston Globe, that “Cingular shouldn’t have even mentioned the company’s name to a reporter.” The research company later stated that Cingular had a “statistically significant lower dropped-call rate than the competition across some market/time period groupings,” but that Telephia had “no knowledge of the specific methodology… Cingular used to reach the nationwide ‘lowest dropped call’ conclusion.” [Bold emphasis is mine]

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I’ve recently switched from Cingular to T-Mobile, back to Cingular, then to Verizon. I am paying more now for Verizon than I did for Cingular (I believe I was one of those unprofitable customers, because I still got a great plan at the same price I started with AT&T Wireless about 3 or 4 years ago on), but Verizon has given me excellent service so far. They have not dropped on me at all, with the exception of one or two calls as I was driving cross-country out in the absolute middle of nowhere (to be expected). And I really like their personal touch; I don’t mind paying for excellent customer service as opposed to horrible customer service.

Here is a little more from the Wireless Consumers Alliance on why wireless providers can (and do) control your phone and limit your choice of phones. This applies to all the wireless providers, but Cingular especially I have found to be unwilling to port over numbers or unlock their phones for customers to use on other networks. You paid for it, you should be able to use it on any network you want:

Even though most wireless phones have the capacity to operate over compatible systems, access is restricted by software in the phone that is programmed, and reprogrammed over the air, by your wireless provider.

This restriction forces your phone to use your home system and the systems of affiliates, without regard to which wireless provider offers the best service in the area where you are making or receiving a call. Furthermore, your phone is “locked” by your wireless provider to prevent any changes and to prevent you from taking your phone with you if you change to a wireless provider with a compatible system. The reason why your wireless provider effectively “own” your phone is early on, the industry obtained a waiver of the anti-trust laws from the FCC and the Department of Justice allowing them to sell phones and service as a package. This practice is known as “bundling” which was the reason why the telephone companies were able to limit consumers’ choice in phone instruments for so long. “Bundling” eventually lead to the break up of the Bell system.

Today, wireless providers use bundling to control the cellular telephone equipment market and the providers select a limited number of models from a limited number of manufacturers for sale/to consumers for use over their systems. An anti-trust complaint is now pending in U.S. Federal court which challenges the right of wireless providers to control the phone market.

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I am hoping that one of these days, the FCC breaks up the whole AT&T family of companies for good. And in the meantime, I’d definitely recommend steering clear of Cingular wireless, AT&T residential services, and any of their internet options through SBC or otherwise. Absolutely ALL of my experiences with these companies have been negative.

What experiences have you had with wireless or internet service providers?

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: 10 Reasons NOT to Do Business With Cingular