Using Twitter for Business--Advice From Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan is a social media advisor, President of New Marketing Labs and a New York Times best selling author. His blog (34,835 readers) and Twitter account (107,988 followers) prove that he knows what he writes about.

New Marketing Labs is "a premier digital marketing, strategy planning and social community engagement firm that builds relationships of value." Sony, Microsoft and Pepsico are just a few of their clients.

In August of 2008, he posted "50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business" as an introductory guide. He used the words human, employees, people, community, customer service and balance in this post. This confirms my experiences that even when you are looking at a cold screen touching a plastic keyboard your goal it to reach out and connect with real, live human beings. Brogan recommends adding a picture (idea #2) to personalize your tweets.

Since I was looking for his main points, I decided to create a Wordle from his post for a visual message. As you can see, the largest (used most often) words are people, business, Tweet, others, human and helps. Of course Twitter stands out as the main focus of the text.

Brogan gives good recommendations for beginning your account. If you reread his first 10 steps, you'll see that they all pertain to building relationships and not selling products. He thinks it is important to "talk to people about THEIR interests" and "promote your employees outside-of-work stories."

Since keeping up with social media can be quite a task, Brogan wisely includes 10 ideas on maintaining your sanity. He suggests learning the URL shortening tools, allowing some tweets to go unread and tweeting in a manner that works for you.

This was a concise, but very informative post. It tells you exactly how to set up your own account and start connecting today.

facebook or Facebook, twitter or Twitter?

The branding for facebook, twitter, delicious and other social media sites spell them with a lower case first letter. Then why are they written so many times with the first letter capitalized?

Of course it should be capitalized when it is the first word in a sentence like facebook has on its sign up page. The name of the company is Facebook, Inc. so maybe writers are referencing to the company rather than the Web page.

If you check out their copyrights, both facebook and twitter use a capital letter. They are also proper nouns so technically they should be capitalized. But doesn't their branding over ride that grammar rule?

The YAHOO! branding uses capital letters with an exclamation mark, but we rarely see it written that way either.

Even Wired spells facebook with a capital f when they mention it in an blog, but they use a lower case letter when they list it as a tag at the end of the page.

To be grammatically correct, do you spell them with a capital letter or lower case? What is the prudent proof reader to do?