Twitter’s weird.  It’s a bit hard to wrap your head around it.  My best advice is to worry about that later.  Whatever Twitter is and whatever it does, it’s evolving.  So, don’t worry about understanding it before you use it.  Through using it you’ll come to understand it, and maybe you’ll even figure out new ways to put it to use.

That said, there are some things that are helpful to know.

What is a Tweet?

Let’s get this out of the way:

A tweet is a piece of text no longer than 140 characters. Spaces and punctuation count. Think of it as a blog entry, a bitesized blog entry.

For reference, that definition is 140 characters long.

Timelines

A timeline on Twitter is a collection of tweets in chronological order.  The Public Timeline consists of every public tweet made.  When you tweet, you create your own timeline that people will see when they visit your profile page.  You can see your own timeline by clicking the Profile link in the top menu.

Every user also has their own unique timeline that consists of the tweets from everyone they follow.  This is what you see when you click the Home link in the top menu.  It’s like your own personal news ticker.  You can follow bunches of different people and all their tweets, except messages to other people, will show up here.

Your Twitter Profile

Click the Settings link in the top menu to edit your Twitter profile. One thing to keep in mind is everything in the Account section is publicly visible.  You can put whatever you like as your name if you don’t want your real name to be public.  Using a head shot as your picture is the norm.  It’s also helpful in convincing people to follow you because it shows off your humanity.  If you aren’t comfortable putting your picture out there try for something eye-catching instead.

Further into your profile options you can upload a background image and change your color scheme.  I think it’s good to stand out a bit here, but it’s also easy to look tacky.  Best to leave the color scheme alone at first.

Following & Followers

Following is Twitter’s word for Subscribing or Friending.  Whenever you visit someone’s profile page you’ll see a little Follow button below their picture.  Click on that button and their tweets will show up on your home timeline.  Following is a one-way action on Twitter.  Unless someone has made their updates private, they don’t have to approve your request to follow.  If they haven’t turned the feature off, they will get an e-mail telling them that you are now following them.  They may well check out your tweets, and follow you back if it looks like you put interesting stuff out there.

Some people will automatically follow anyone who follows them.  In fact you can find websites with huge lists of people who will auto-follow you back.  I strongly advise against this tactic for gaining followers.  Quality is definitely better than quantity when it comes to followers.  I’d much rather have 100 followers who actually read what I tweet than 10,000 who could care less.

As you tweet you’ll start getting those e-mails to let you know that someone is following you.  Your first question will probably be, “Why are they following me?”  Often people will discover you and follow after finding a tweet of yours in a search.  Something you posted might also get ReTweeted by one of your followers, leading their followers to check you out.  People might discover you through a link on a website, or some random e-mail newsletter.

Here’s what I do when I get a new follower:

• I click the link in the e-mail to look at their profile.
• I look at their ratio of Following to Followers.  People who follow many, but are followed by few are often a bit spammy in their tweeting.
• I read their little bio, and inspect their tweets.  I ignore any tweet that starts with @somebody because those won’t end up in my timeline unless they’re directed at me or someone else I follow.
• I look at how often they tweet.  If someone’s tweeting 20+ times a day then their tweets have to be pretty good for me to follow back.
• If there’s more than one or two shamelessly self promotional tweets I won’t follow them.
• If they seem to be advertising ways to make money on twitter or gain thousands of followers, I’m gone.
• If they seem genuine, remotely interesting, and I have some interest in common I’ll follow back.

Remember that people will look at your Profile this way before following you.

Conversation

Direct Messages are private.  Only the sender and recipient can see them.  You can only send them to people following you.  In my experience, Direct Messages are not a good way of communicating.  They are often ignored and often used to spam.  You’re much better off with e-mail or Google Wave for private conversation.

You can see tweets mentioning you by clicking the @YourName link on the right side of the Twitter page.  To direct a tweet at someone specific begin it with @ followed by their username.  For instance, after reading this you might want to tweet:

@PGrandstaff Wow, that newsletter was great! I’m going to tell all my friends about it.

Or, maybe you’ll want to tell me where to shove this tutorial.  Either way, you can be sure I’ll get the message because you directed it at me.  The rest of your followers won’t see that tweet, but it would be publicly visible on your Profile page.

To let your followers get the tweet in their timeline, and direct it at someone just include the @username someplace other than the beginning.  For instance:

I just finished learning all kinds of stuff from @PGrandstaff’s newsletter. You should check it out!

I bet I’d even ReTweet that one.

ReTweets (RT)

ReTweeting is when someone repeats someone else’s tweet, so their own followers can see the original message.  This is now a full fledged feature of Twitter, but it started organically.  People wanted to pass on tweets, so they ReTweeted.  Twitter listened, and now tweets in a timeline have a ReTweet button.

The traditional way of ReTweeting follows a formula:

RT @OriginalAuthor Content of original tweet [ReTweeter's comment]

It varies of course, some people credit the author at the end with “via @OriginalAuthor.”  The nice thing about this method is you can add your own thoughts.  However, problems arise with the 140 character limit per tweet.  In order to credit the author or add a comment tweets can be edited for length when ReTweeting.  There is a risk of altering the original meaning, though.

So, the new, official ReTweet feature lets you send someone’s tweet to all your followers with a click.  Your followers will see the tweet as if they were following the original author, with their picture and name.  Your name will appear underneath as the person relaying the tweet.

The Official ReTweet function probably won’t replace the original.  So, for optimal ReTweetability leave room in your tweets for people to add “RT @YourName ” — that’s 5 characters plus the length of your user name.

Hashtags: #hashtag

Hashtags let you add categories or keywords to your tweet.  Using hashtags allows people to aggregate all the tweets on a subject.  They consist of the hash sign, #, and a keyword with no spaces.  This is another feature created by Twitter users that is now official.  Hashtags are now automatically turned into links to Twitter searches.

You’ll see hashtags being used for conferences and events a lot.  You can follow live coverage of all sorts of things by searching for the associated hashtag.  You can track what’s going on in a city or state, or you can tune in to a topic.

A couple of examples for you, #NaNoWriMo #NC #SmallBiz.  It isn’t always easy to tell what a hashtag is about just by looking at it.  A Google search should tell you if clicking on the hashtag doesn’t.

See also, How to Tweet Well.

This post first appeared in my monthly small business newsletter.

Newsletter Contents

• And now for something completely different…

This month I resolved to exclude Google from the newsletter.  I was going to talk about customer retention strategies.  It’s all the rage these days, what with the economy and all.

Then I watched a video on YouTube. This video blew my mind. It was the first announcement of a new Google product that will change the world, and how we communicate. So, I’ve decided to depart from my usual format and tell you about what I saw.

Google’s developer conference, Google I/O 09, took place May 27 and 28, this past Wednesday and Thursday.  Thursday evening I saw on twitter that the Google Wave Developer Preview from the conference was available on YouTube.  Wow.

Google Wave is now being tested and extended by all the conference attendees, with the first accounts outside Google.  It is a ‘communication and collaboration tool’ to be released later this year.  It integrates the functionality of e-mail, instant messaging, collaborative authoring, media sharing, and discussion forums into a single interface using a single protocol.  The whole thing, server, protocol, interface, is free and open.

Okay, honestly, you have to see it.  It’s such a paradigm shift that I can’t just write up an explanation that will truly impress upon you what Google Wave is.  I’ll do my best though, as the video is geared toward a tech-literate audience, and is an hour twenty minutes long.  If you want to dive in, they start showing Wave itself at about 7:30 in the video.

Watch it on YouTube

Here’s the interface to Google Wave:

This all happens inside a web browser.  On the left are your folders and contacts.  In the center is your in-box on the right is a Wave.  A Wave is very versatile.  It can be an instant messaging conversation, an e-mail, a photo gallery, a collaboratively authored document, or even a game of chess.  Basically it can carry out any type of communication we do on the internet.

All these varied forms of communication have a unified in-box.  If you send someone an e-mail, and they open it while you have it open you’ll see their response in real-time.  If someone adds photos to a shared gallery the gallery pops up in your in-box.  The Wave adapts to any usage as needed.

Each user on a Wave can edit the Wave.  You could post a list of action items for your team, add the team as users, and everyone could add, comment on, and assign items.  You would see each others changes in real-time, with colored markers showing where others are editing in the document.  You and your spouse could label your vacation pictures together from any two computers before embedding the Wave on a website for your friends to see.

Of course, with everyone editing something you need a way to fix things, and see who did what.  So each Wave has a time line.  You can rewind, and play back all the changes to a Wave.  If you and a friend are playing chess on a Wave you can rewind and see the whole game history, move by move.

Sounds pretty amazing, but I for one would be frustrated that all my data lived on Google’s servers.  Remember how I said Google Wave was free and open?  All the specifications and software will be freely available.  Your company can run its own Wave server on your own domain name.  Wave accounts on your server will be compatible with any other Wave account and you can send Waves to anyone.  However, any waves that are only sent between your internal users will never leave your server.

You’ll be able to have complete control over your data.  That’s what will allow Google Wave to change the world.  If they made it proprietary and kept everyone’s data on their own servers then it would never achieve worldwide use.

One feature that is particularly amazing is real-time translation.  If I speak English and Pierre speaks French, we can type to each other in our native languages and Wave will translate our messages in real-time.  It can handle 40 languages.  It’s amazing.  I was awestruck when I saw it.  It’s at 1:12:00 in the video.

Okay, I’m going on pretty long here, so I’ll wrap up with some highlights and further reading links for those interested.

• contextual spell checking – It doesn’t check spelling against a dictionary, but within the context of how you use the word.  So, if you write ‘their’ when you meant ‘they’re’ it will catch it.  It’s so good that often it is so confident that it will automatically correct your spelling.  If you type ‘Icland is an icland.”  It will automatically be changed to ‘Iceland is an island.’
• drag and drop instant sharing – drag some photos from your computer into a wave and your recipient will see thumbnails before you’ve even finished uploading.
• extensible – anyone can create new gadgets and features, like surveys, integration with other websites, or polls and surveys.
• embeddable – Waves can be embedded in websites and comments made on the website will appear in the wave, while comments added to the wave show up on the web.

You can learn more at wave.google.com or check out a good article at CIO.com

Cheers,

Peter

Images courtesy of

The April 2009 issue of my e-mail newsletter covered Google Analytics and it’s importance in online success.  You can read it online and sign up to get the next issue as soon as it hits the net.  The new Google Analytics API has been made publicly available, so I’ve been playing with that using PHP.

Besides creating better websites and enhancing visibility for my clients I’ve gotten myself onto twitter.  (Twitter is a micro-blogging / social networking / social media site.)  You can “follow me on twitter“, and I’m sure I’ll have a widget on the sidebar here before long to display my latest tweets. (A tweet is a micro-blog-post on twitter.)

There are also some rumors that Apple may be buying twitter.  I hope not, I like the independent nature of it now.  Of course, with over 25 million users it’s a very lucrative property right now.

These days we all end up with tons of passwords.  We rely on these passwords to keep sensitive information safe, but the truth is that information is only as safe as its password is secure.  In my experience people tend to use simple, insecure passwords because they have a hard time remembering long strings of letters, numbers, and punctuation.   Well it can be a lot easier than you might think.  I found this video put together by AARP and Google that gives a good introduction:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ve been a fan of using initial letters from a phrase to form a password since college.  That’s the method the Network Systems Administrator there taught me.  What the video above doesn’t talk about though is complexity.  Watch the longer video below for more on that.

A password made out of six lowercase letters is never going to be a strong and secure password, even if they are random.  The best passwords are at least 10 characters long and include uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation.  Okay, it’s about time for an example…

Crafting a Secure Password From a Phrase

1. Think of a line from a song or poem, a quotation, or a catchphrase. Don’t use your own catchphrase, or the quotation framed on your wall: you don’t want to use something easy to guess.  The foundation of your secure password will be the first letter of each word in your phrase.  If you’re feeling extra tricky you could use the last letters, or use the letters backwards.  Just be sure to include a capital or three.

For our example I’ll use a line from a Beatles song: “We all live in a Yellow Submarine” If that was my favorite song, or I had a big Yellow Submarine poster on my wall this would be a poor choice.

That gives us our letters, “WaliaYS” but what about punctuation and numbers?

2. Figure out a way to add numbers and punctuation to your letters. Make sure it’s logical enough that you can remember it.

Our example phrase makes this pretty easy.  We’ll add an exclamation mark and a number to the end.  What’s a number I’ll remember though?  1968, the year Yellow Submarine was released.
Ta-da, a strong and secure password that’s easy to remember! “WaliaYS!1968“

That’s a 12 character password with good complexity, and you won’t forget it.  Of course, you have to make your own, this one is just an example.  It will seem awkward to type your new password the first few times, but after a few repetitions you’ll be able to type in your strong password with ease.

4 Rules For a Strong Password

As long as you follow some basic rules you can make strong passwords any way you like.

1. Make sure your password is at the very least 8 characters long, 16 is even better. Each additional character makes it exponentially harder to crack the code.
2. Include punctuation, numbers, and both uppercase and lowercase letters. Brute force attacks, that is trying every possible combination, often omit punctuation or numbers to increase speed.
3. Never use information about yourself in your password. That means no birthdays, phone numbers, kids’ or kittens’ names, or addresses.  It’s too easy to guess those.
4. Do not use dictionary words. The first attack hackers use is often a dictionary attack.  If your password is a dictionary word, or even based on one, it is easy to crack.

Common foreign language dictionary words aren’t a good idea either.  If you’re a word nerd you can use words from dead languages, or transliterations of words from languages like Sanskrit, Hebrew, or Arabic.  Just be sure to follow rules one and two above.

Passphrases and More

Even better than a password is a passphrase.  A passphrase is a password using multiple words, including spaces.  It could be a dozen words long rather than a dozen characters.  Not all systems support spaces in passwords, but it is becoming a standard slowly.  A good example is with wi-fi.  It’s always wise to secure your wireless network with a password or key.  If you use WEP security you won’t be able to include spaces in your password.  Using WPA security will allow you to make a passphrase up to 63 characters long, but 40 to 55 characters is a good length.  On a side note, WEP encryption is not very secure.  You should use WPA-PSK, Wi-Fi Protected Access Pre-Shared Key, for your wireless networks.  Use WPA2 if your hardware supports it.

If you’d like some more in-depth information on this topic this video gives an easy to understand overview of the more technical aspects involved:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Want more? Check out Security Focus.

As I got to thinking about it I realized that there must be other great free for non-profit services out there. I’ve been doing some research and below you’ll find 8 useful eResources that are completely free to qualified non-profits. They include web hosting, marketing, software, and web application solutions.

Some of these are even free for anyone, and can be of great value to businesses, small and large.  I include them because they can be especially valuable to non-profits.  By employing free open source software you can keep your IT budget to a minimum without sacrificing.

DreamHost – Web Hosting Free For Non-Profits

DreamHost offers their powerful carbon-neutral web hosting for free to non-profits. Instructions for claiming your non-profit status are on the DreamHost wiki.

DreamHost is the hosting company I use, and suggest for most of my clients. They are an employee owned company that offers solid service at a low price with impeccable customer service and a great control panel.

If you don’t qualify as a non-profit you can still make use of this DreamHost promo code to get a discount of $50 on any plan. Just enter the code GRANDSTAFF to claim your discount when you sign up.

DreamHost also offers 1-Click Installs of some of the web applications mentioned below such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.  It’s very easy and they guide you through the process with ease.

Google Analytics – Website Statistics and Analysis

Google Analytics is a versatile and powerful website traffic analysis package that is free for anyone.  That is, unless you get 5 million page views per month, then it’s free if you are an Adwords customer.  Of course if you’re getting that many page views then you’re already using Adwords.

When you sign up you’ll get a snippet of code to put at the bottom of all your website’s pages.  Once you’ve added it all you need to do is log into Google’s site and you’ll have access to a dizzying number of metrics for your site’s traffic and useage.  There’s nothing more useful when you need to propose new funding or projects to your board (or your boss) than hard numbers, and Google Analytics will give you just that.  It even creates custom graphs and lets you download everything in PDF format!  You can also grant access to the data to other users so your whole team can stay up to date.

Vertical Response – Email Marketing

Vertical Response offers email marketing that is free for non profits up to 10,000 emails per month.  They also provide discounted rates on their survey and postcard services.  Direct email can be an incredibly powerful way to stay on your donors’ minds and to keep your volunteer base up to date and in the know.  You can use it for a monthly newsletter, or to get the word out quickly when needed.

Now, if you’re looking for an email marketing solution for business I use and suggest AWeber. They have a extensive feature set at a competitive price. Perhaps what really sets them apart is their emphasis on educating you in how to make the best use of their service and their outstanding customer support. There are tons of videos, tutorials, and webinars to make sure you know how to take full advantage of your email marketing campaigns. They are also always adding new features and have stood the test of time. You’ll also get a free month to test drive it and make sure it’s right for you, so there’s no risk!

I just heard from AWeber regarding their discount for any non-profit:

* The account will include 3 months of service at no cost then following this period a discount of 25% off monthly billing.
* You will need to postal mail or fax us the order form completed with cc number and a copy of your 501c3.

With Vertical Response or AWeber you’ll get reporting features for your email campaigns.  You can see what percentage of people opened your message, how many clicked a link, which links, and more.  This alongside Google Analytics  will give you all the metrics you need to report on the effectiveness of your on-line presence.

CiviCRM – Open Source Constituent Relationship Management

CiviCRM is a completely free (as in speech and beer) relationship management system designed for non-profits.  The feature set is aimed at activism groups, non-profit organizations, and non-governmental organizations.  It is designed to integrate seamlessly with either Joomla or Drupal, which are both free and open source content management systems.

Optional modules can be added for specific needs such as fund-raising, event registration, and more.  Combined with the flexibility offered by Drupal or Joomla this is a free website platform that can meet the needs of even the largest organizations.  There are reports of it managing a database of 7 million constituents, but it’s free and you could even run it on your DreamHost account!

A few of the non-profit organizations using CiviCRM are…

• Amnesty International
• Creative Commons
• Wikimedia Foundation
• Atlanta Audobon Society

Google Grants – Free Advertising

This might be the highest value item on this list.  It’s also the most exclusive.  Non-profit organizations  meeting Google’s eligibility requirements may may apply for a grant to receive up to $10,000 of free Adwords advertising per month.  Yes, that’s Ten Thousand dollars worth of advertising free for non- profits!

Adwords is Google’s advertising program.  You bid on keywords to have your ads appear alongside search results for those keywords.  It’s pay-per-click advertising, which means you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.  In addition to targeting keywords you can exclude keywords or target your campaigns to specific geographic areas.  Adwords is an effective way to advertise any size website.

Google Grants is not open to everyone, but most community organizations and advocacy groups should be eligible to apply.  They also expect you to make use of the free account and may terminate it if you let it go dormant.

OpenOffice.org – Open Source Office Suite

Also known as OO.o, OOo, or plain old Open Office.  It is a completely free for anyone office suite including word processor, spreadsheet, presentation creator, and more.  This can save a non-profit a couple hundred dollars per computer.  Just make sure Microsoft Office doesn’t come on your new computers.

It seems like everyone thinks they need Microsoft Office, but Open Office will meet all their needs and add features they’ve always wanted in Microsoft Office.  For instance Open Office can open MS Word and Excel documents and it can export files as PDF, easily.

On top of all the great features Open Office runs on MacOS, Linux, and Windows!  That means you can open your files on any computer.  If you’ve ever tried to open Microsoft Works documents on a Mac you know how valuable that can be.

Google Apps Education Version – Web-based Mail & Collaboration Application Suite

Google Apps Education Editioni is a set of web-based applications and services that runs on Google’s servers but using your domain name.  You can outsource your email & office applications, use instant messaging, host video, and collaborate.  The Education Edition includes some extra features and is also free for non-profit organizations.

You can use Google Apps with any domain, but the Education Edition has some extra features that could benefit larger organizations.  If you use DreamHost for your hosting you’ll be able to install Google Apps when you set up a new domain in the control panel.

Wordpress – Blog & Content Management System

Wordpress can confuse people at first because there are two Wordpresses: WordPress.org is home to the free and open source blogging software, and WordPress.com is a site that runs the WordPress software and lets you host your own blog on their site.  The are both free to anyone and great for non-profit organizations.  If you have your own website you can install WordPress as an add-on to provide a blog on your site, or it can be used to run the entire site like a content management system, or CMS. In fact you’re looking at WordPress right now, as I use it to run my website.

You can log into an administrative panel on your website and write or edit content as if you were using a word processor, or using HTML if you prefer. WordPress stores your content in a database and automatically applies styles or themes to your work so you can worry about creating content rather than making things work and look right.

Out of the box WordPress isn’t the best CMS.  (It’s a great blogging framework!)  Luckily there are many many freely available extensions that add all sorts of features to WordPress making it a very adaptable and easy to use CMS.  You don’t need to be an expert to use it or install it, especially if you use DreamHost!

Finally…

For sticking it out to the end of this post I’ll tell you about one last resource: Me, Peter Grandstaff.  I do consulting and implementation of web solutions at no cost for select non-profits.  Currently this is by invitation only.  I will offer discounted pricing to most 501(c) (3) entities though, so be sure to ask about it!

If any of these resources sound like they could be of use to your organization, but you’re not sure how to go about putting them in place, you should contact me for a free consultation.  I will be happy to help you navigate the options and find the best fit for your unique needs, whether you’re a non-profit organization or not!

Got one I didn’t cover?  Share other free resources for non-profits below, and have a great day!