Thanks to Christine Bode for providing us with some great coverage on her blog Scully Loves Promo. Christine is also a CYT member who offers a variety of services. We are also indebted to her for proofreading the site, especially as we had made a few spelling and grammer mistakes!

Book Review
Title: The Little Book of Twitter
Author: Tim Collins
Publisher: Michael O’Mara Books Limited
Released: 2009
Pages: 160
ISBN – 978-1-84317-405-9
Stars: 3.5

Tim Collins’ The Little Book of Twitter leapt out at me from the sale table at Indigo Books on Sunday and with a sticker price of only $2.00, I just had to buy it! I decided that it’s high time I learn how to use Twitter as effectively as possible and as the book advertises, Get Tweetwise!

After using Twitter for over a year, sporadically at best, I had figured out much of what The Little Book of Twitter has to offer but it did present me with a few great tips that I wasn’t aware of. It’s also chock full of humour (that Tim Collins should be a stand-up comedian!) and I caught myself laughing out loud a few times. In fact, it is just as entertaining as it is useful.

You can learn how to tweet yourself clever, discover whether or not you’re a twitterholic, ten types of Twitter twat, the strangest twittersonas, and learn about some celebrity twits (I mean tweeters, no, twitterati!) and their scandals: who’s been twitterjacked and who has a ghost-tweeter:

“While it’s understandable that celebrities might turn to ghost-writers for help with full-length autobiographies, it’s pretty sad if they can’t even manage a sentence all on their own [Fiddy Cent]. What next? Paying someone to speak and move for you so you can sit still all day in a massive bathtub full of money?”

Aside from learning some Tweologisms and other jargon and abbreviations, I did glean some useful tidbits. In Everything you need to know about Twitter in 10 tweets, #7 Desktop applications such as TweetDeck (which you can download from tweetdeck.com) will help you get more out of Twitter. “TweetDeck lets you arrange the people you’re following into groups, which will then appear as additional columns. This is especially useful if you’re following so many people that the updates of those that you’re actually interested in are getting lost.” There are other interesting Twitter tools listed as well.

This ‘#’ is a hashtag, which appears before a word or phrase, and tweeters use them to make it easier to search for a topic they’re interested in. If you use “a hashtag in your tweet it will create a link that takes people to all the other recent tweets on the same subject.”

You have to decide how you want to use Twitter in order to get the most out of it. You can keep in contact with family and friends, meet new people, follow others, or use it as a promotional tool. One thing is certain you must know and follow the netiquette of Twitter.

• Don’t overtweet
• Don’t undertweet
• Don’t worry about answering the question “What are you doing?”
• Don’t go overboard with abbreviations
• Don’t boast
• Don’t tweet about how many followers you have
• Don’t post updates than span more than one tweet
• Don’t try to use up the whole 140 characters every single time
• Be subtle with your plugs
• Give a bit of explanation for your links
• Retweet instead of passing off the tweets of others as your own
• Don’t retweet everything in your feed
• Don’t send everyone who follows you an automatic message of thanks
• Don’t drink and tweet
• Don’t tweet if nothing whatsoever has changed in your life since your last tweet
• Don’t only send @ replies to celebrities
• Restrict boring conversations to direct messages
• Don’t put personal things in @ messages

How do you decide if you want to follow someone back? “Take a look at the kind of links they’re posting. Will these be useful to you, or will they spam you with the same link in every update? Look at their ratio of following to followers. If they follow thousands of people but few people follow them back, it’s not a great sign.” Boy, do I have some unfollowing to do with my account!

It is important to note that when using Twitter for marketing or promoting anything, the principles are much the same as for personal use. “If you interact with people by replying to their tweets, you’ll have a much greater presence than if you just use Twitter to broadcast.” And that’s the tricky part, because using it properly requires effort and takes TIME. I have been a guilty broadcaster and I must change my naughty ways!

Finally, when you decide that you do have the time for Twitter, be sure to adhere to the Ten Commandments of Twitter:

1. Thou shalt interact.
2. Thou shalt not spam.
3. Thou shalt tweet when thou hast something worth tweeting about.
4. Thou shalt not continue thy messages over multiple tweets. What dost thou think this is, thy blog?
5. Thou shalt honour thy Stephen Fry.
6. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt retweet instead.
7. Thou shalt not LOL unless something’s really funny. Like thou art snorting coffee out of thy nose or something.
8. Thou shalt not turn every @ message into a link to thy blog.
9. Thou shalt not follow false idols. Only those idols who write their own tweets rather than getting their publicists to do it for them are worthy of thy attention.
10. Remember the #followfriday [the tradition of suggesting new people to follow on a Friday] and keep it holy.

Being a mom who works at home, to the outsider, sounds like the dream job. You have the flexibility and the benefit of staying with your children all day, and have the added bonus of being able to wear pajama’s well into the afternoon.

There are, however, a few things you need to consider when starting that “dream job”.

1. Children will always bother you. If you need a quite minute to get work accomplished, expect to be up either really early, or really late. It’s like the telephone syndrome, everyone is happy and quite until you go on the phone and then all hell breaks loose…If you have a major project with a deadline, children will naturally have the inability to be quiet.

2. The working day is far beyond eight hours. With every little interruption, the glass of water, the trip to the park, breakfast, lunch, dinner, the housework – all those daily “mom” jobs all need to be intermixed during YOUR work time. Expect a 16 hour day, but you’re only getting 4hrs of real work accomplished, maybe…

3. When you are working really smoothly and the children are quiet and good…expect a disaster. Motto: If you can’t hear them, something bad is happening.

4. Everyone will assume you have it easy. Why shouldn’t they? YOU get to stay at home; there is a luxury in there…somewhere. Do they realize your working, watching the children AND keeping up with the house? While they are off at work, there is nobody IN their house!

5. When you isolate yourself to work after your husband comes home, expect some resentment. Husbands are funny…when they come home not only do they want to see their spouse, but you are still required in “mom” mode. If you’re absent that means he needs to change a dirty diaper…by himself… Poor thing, he’s been at work all day and needs a rest – note the sarcasm.

Now don’t get me wrong there is joy in the ability to work from home, did I mention the pajama’s? Just keep in mind that it may not be all it’s cracked up to be sometimes.

Staying current is one of the hardest things when running your own business. In fact, the internet, with its ability to present you to a limitless number of new clients all over the world, also has the capacity of drowning you out in a sea of overwhelming competition.

So how can you and your business stand out? You’re going to need a support network.

If you have a small business, social media marketing is the first step in creating that network. Three of the most popular social networking sites are

1. LinkedIn
2. Facebook
3. Twitter

All of these are relationship building – and maintaining- sites. If you want to make you and your business known, add friends, share your knowledge and keep up the conversation. Google Blog search is another excellent tool – find people who are like minded and comment on their posts.

Social media is the new word of mouth. The goal is to meet new people and get them talking about you. Creating a presence online brings positive traffic to your website. If you have a great service or product people will talk about it and that information could appear on other people’s blogs, forums, and message boards – anywhere people talk – driving new clients to your site. (Remember the same goes if you have a bad product…)

TIPS:

• Don’t be afraid to ask people to be your friend just because they are either
  1. A friend of a friend
  2. You found them outside of Facebook/ Linkedin – ie you read their blog, like a comment they made – you have similar interests
• Tweet – a lot
• Comment – a lot
• Always leave a link back to your own site when you comment on someone else’s
• Always remember these are your potential CUSTOMERS

The key is to broaden your concept of ‘friends’. These new friends become the foundation of your support network. If you have a new product to push these friends will do it. On the internet networking is easy, and with a bit of effort you have the potential of not only increasing your client base, but maintaining it.

Talk in forums, comment, contribute, get yourself out there – network, network, and network – the best part of social media marketing is you can do virtually anywhere and meet people everywhere.

If you are new to social media marketing check out some of these links:
http://www.socialmediatoday.com/
http://www.seomoz.org/article/social-media-marketing-tactics

It’s the New Year and you’re getting ready to put your new business plan into action. Part of this plan is to create your website. There are many great businesses out there to design and build your site just as there are many articles and sites dedicated to help the ‘do-it-yourself’ crowd. But either way you choose to go, there are basic setup steps that you should follow to protect your business. Just like you protect your physical business, you need to protect the Internet branch of your business.

A ‘website’ is essentially made of two parts: your domain name (often known as your ‘dot com’ name) and your web pages. Your domain name is a naming system that uses nameservers to tell a computer where to find your website. For instance, the domain name timefindersmagazine.com uses a nameserver (ns111.canadianwebhosting.com) to tell other computers that this website is hosted on the server 76.74.187.200. As humans, we’ll remember the domain name timefindersmagazine.com before we’ll remember that IP address! This domain name is registered with a domain name registrar.

The second part of your website are your web pages which are stored at your hosting company. This is a company that has a series of computers where you can store the files that make up your webpages, host an email account ( you@yourdomainname.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ), and access tools like backups, templates, online stores, etc. There are many hosting companies with large pricing differences out there but you should look for some basics:

• stability of the company and ‘uptime’ of the servers
• backup policies
• number of email accounts allowed
• 24×7 support
• no contract fees and other guarantees
• host both Windows and Linux servers
• offer a control panel

Make your comparison list, do a Google search and see reviews on the company, call and email the hosting company and then make your decision. If you are working with a web designer, they will be able to help guide you in your choice of web hosts.

So now that we know the basic definitions of what a website is, what do you need to know when you are creating accounts with your domain name registrar and your web hosting company? You need to maintain ownership. Bottom line. Especially if you are working with a company to help you through this process, please be sure to explicitly state that you and your company should be the only contacts for the domain name. Too often, businesses will want to change hosting companies, change domain registrars or change web designers and they find they have lost control of their information!

The information you should control when you have registered your domain and hosting your webpages is:

• your domain registrar account name and login
  This will allow you to make changes to your name, address and email information as well as your nameservers.
  TIP: use an email account NOT associated with your domain eg. a Gmail or HotMail account
• if you have registered a .CA domain, you will also have your Canadian Internet Registration Authority account name and login
  CIRA will request authorization before transferring any .CA domain so you will need to have access to this account should you ever need to transfer your domain.
• your hosting account name and login
  This will allow you to login to your host where you can upload webpages, create email accounts, and access other tools.

If you are not the person setting up all the accounts, please make sure you receive all this information. To check to see whether your information is correct, you can use websites like Network Solutions or WHOIS.net to display your information. Click here to see an example whois record.

There are many considerations when taking your business out into the Internet and you will find that it is an ever changing environment where the hard fast ‘rules’ of today become passé as the next new big thing comes along. But through it all, you will retain ownership of your Internet business because though you may be small now, everybody will know your name right? Cheers!