My Twitter Experience So Far – Part I

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I had heard a lot about Twitter.com and had even signed up for a few different accounts, but really hadn’t done anything at all with it until last week.  Over the last three days, I have immersed myself in all things Twitter and this is my report on how to get started and how to get followers.  I will cover everything from the very basics to how I got over 1,000 followers in 2 days.  I’m writing down what I wish I could have read last week!

The Basics

Just in case you have been hiding out somewhere, Twitter is a social website where people post very short (140 characters maximum) posts typically about what they are doing at the moment.  Posts are also referred to as “updates” or “tweets”.  You can “follow” people and then their updates show up in your stream.  They can follow you back if they want and then they will see your updates in their stream.  I’m LoPaul on Twitter and you can follow me on Twitter here.  You can post updates from the Twitter website, from your cell phone or your iPhone, and also from several different Twitter tools – both standalone applications and web applications.  Twitter was originally designed with cell phone texting in mind and this is where the short limit comes from.  You can add your mobile phone to your Twitter account so you can text in your updates and have other people’s updates texted to your phone.  Make sure you have an unlimited texting package if you choose to do this!

The Follow

You have 2 numbers – your “following” and your “followers”.  This is the number of people you are following and the number who are following you, respectively.  As a general rule, you want them to be about equal without one hugely bigger than the other.  Unless you are a celebrity like Ashton Kutcher (142 Following and 1,574,304 Followers at the time of this writing) you need to follow other people in order to get them to “follow you back”.  Also, Twitter places limits (I’ve heard it is about 2,000) on how many people you can follow who don’t follow you back, so if your following is greater than your followers by over 2,000 then you won’t be able to follow anyone else.

The Follow Rules

These are rules to follow if you are trying to increase your followers count.

  1. Always follow back to anyone who starts following you.  This builds goodwill and people will spread the word that you will follow back and recommend others to follow you as well.
  2. Don’t let your following get much above your followers count.  Having wildly different numbers will turn people off and prevent them from following you.  Periodically go through your following list and purge people who haven’t followed you back.

The @

One important thing to know is you can reference someone in a post by adding @name in your post (change “name” to the person you want to reference).  Anything with an “@” in front gets turned into a link to that person’s profile and also they can easily see any responses that mention them.  When you are logged in, there is a “replies” tab (labeled @LoPaul or whatever your name is) which shows any posts with your @name in them.  Even if you don’t follow someone and they use your @name, you will still see it in your replies list.  This is the most common way to direct a message to a person.

Keep in mind that your @name post is directed at a specific person, but it is not private to them!  It appears in your timeline and in the timeline of everyone else who follows you.  You can also include as many @name’s as you want in a message.

The DM

Unlike using @name, a Direct Message (or DM) is a private message only seen by the recipient.  This is sort of like a Twitter inbox.  DMs are still held to the 140 character limit.  Many people have abused DMs for spam, so DMs typically aren’t used by the community.  You can pretty safely ignore DMs completely.  In your account settings you can disable DM so people can’t even send you DMs.

The #

Putting a # (hashtag) in front of any word marks it as a keyword.  For example #Austin would mean your post was relative to Austin or #cooking would mean it was relevant to cooking.  Warning: Use hashtags correctly and sparingly.  They are socially understood to be informative on the topic.  Hashtags will often come from an authority on the hashtag topic.  For instance, you shouldn’t use hashtags when just posting about your daily activities unless it is something informative to the topic.

The RT

Putting a RT in your message indicates a “ReTweet”. If you see a great tweet, you can re-broadcast it to everyone that follows you using this method.  The RT is usually at the beginning of the message, but can be anywhere in the message. It should include the @name of the original person posting it as well. This is a decent way to build good will by retweeting other people’s posts, but make sure not to overdo it.

The #FollowFriday

This is a good common tradition to know about.  Hopefully obviously, people post “Follow Friday” posts on Fridays.  This is a post with #FollowFriday (or #FF) and a list of @name people that you recommend for others to follow.  It is a way to give back to people you have been corresponding with and recommend them to your followers as someone that they should follow as well.  This is typically done in the hopes that other people will reciprocate and include you in a #FF post.

Next Time

The basics turned out to be more lengthy than I thought.  Next time I’ll cover the common Twitter tools, how to simplify tasks, and how to increase your follower count.

For now, get Twittering and make sure to follow me on Twitter!

Proceed to Part II

Keeping Track Of Your Thoughts

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This post contains my most helpful tips for keeping track of your thoughts. I have tried a number of software programs to keep todo lists and things like that, but I still find that good old fashioned pen and paper are the best for me.

Notebooks

I keep a notebook for each component of my life.  I currently have three: one for work, one for personal, and one for this blog and other entrepreneurial ideas.  I prefer spiral bound notebooks or composition books over the legal pad style notebooks.  Since I never tear out pages and just keep working my way through them, flipping over pages from a legal pad makes them unwieldy and hard to flip through them back and forth.

Take a sharpie and write your name, the topic, and the start date on the front cover of the notebook.  Now get going taking notes!

Specialize

I want to really stress the importance of keeping the notebooks separate.  I originally started with one notebook and wrote down work and personal information.  I found it was that much harder to locate information when everything was jumbled together.

Don’t be afraid to start new notebooks for new things. When we moved across the country, I started a separate notebook just for the move. This was always by my side and had all my information in one place. I had information for the actual move – moving company, plane info, car transport, plus things like canceling the old utilities and starting up the new ones. This was essential during the move and I referred to this one for a long time after the move.  Also, when we moved again I had a great template for replicating a lot of the details.

Write Down Everything

Every time I talk to someone on the phone I write it down in the appropriate notebook.  Always get the person’s name and always write the date in the margin.  This has helped me so many times that I want to stress it again – write down the name of the person you talked to.  Then months later when there is a problem, you can flip back and say something like “I talked to Mary on February 12 and she said she would reverse that charge”.

Write Something

Even if you aren’t doing anything spectacular or don’t have any todo items to write down, try to write down something as often as you can. This helps to give a frame of reference when you are looking back through the pages. If you are trying to find a particular note it helps to have other things written down which happened at a similar time.

I have gotten in the habit of starting my day off by writing the date in both my personal and work notebooks. I then write up a list of todo items that I want to accomplish that day, if I have any.

Take Them Everywhere

Get in the habit of taking them back and forth to work or wherever you go. I always pack them into my laptop bag with my laptop so I have them at work or at home.  It is very frustrating to not have your notebook when you need it. I also keep the last archived notebooks in by laptop bag too.  Once you find yourself not referring to older notebooks, then safely archive them somewhere at home.

Check Boxes

This is a really handy tip that I do automatically now.  If you write down a todo item in your notebook, make an empty square in the margin on the left.  When you finish the todo item, check it off!  Now you can easily scan the page and see what you have done and what you still need to do.  As a variation, you can draw one line of the “X” when you start working on it and then write the next line of the “X” upon completion.

Use Them As Reference

When you fill a notebook, write the end date on the front cover and save it! I now have years worth of notebooks for reference and can flip back to discover exact dates and names of people that I talked to previously.  If you find yourself coming back to particular information, stick a post-it at that location for quick reference next time, or copy the information to your current notebook.

Thoughts?

Your first todo is to give me feedback! Do you already do anything like this? Is this helpful? Do you have a better system? Please post a comment or email me. I’d be especially interested if you have a great software based solution that you use.

Go Veg – Save The World

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Here is a big Logan Challenge – try going vegetarian. If you have even been thinking about eating less meat, Earth Day is a great reason to hopefully push you over the edge and try it.

Why Earth Day?

So how is being a vegetarian related to Earth Day?

  • Pollution: animals raised for food in the USA produce 130 times more excrement than the human population
  • Pollution: raising animals for food causes more global warming than cars, planes, ships, trains, and SUVs in the world combined
  • Resources: More than 1/2 of the water used in the USA is used for raising animals for food
  • Resources: More than 1/3 of all USA raw materials and fossil fuel usage is for raising animals for food
  • Land: For each 1 acre of American forest cleared for parking lots, roads, houses, and shopping malls, 7 acres of forest are converted into land for grazing livestock and/or growing livestock feed
  • Land: 20 times more land is required to feed a meat-eater than to feed a vegetarian
  • Waste: it takes 16 pounds of grain to produce 1 pound of meat

So you can’t really call yourself an environmentalist if you eat meat. Raising meat for food is the number one cause of greenhouse gases and switching to a vegetarian diet is more eco-friendly than driving a hybrid car.

How To Get Started

For more information and to get active about it, check out peta2.com/meatsnotgreen on PETA’s website.

Start in any way you can. Cold turkey (pun intended) is the best – just stop eating meat. If you can’t do that then make a change that you can handle. Try eating vegetarian for 3 days a week. Then expand from there.

For help getting started order (or download) the free vegetarian starter kit from the PETA website.

Make sure to let me know your results if you decide to start living vegetarian.

Just Do It

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Yeah, I know that is the Nike slogan and is overdone and overused, but it is still great advice to live by. Actually take a look at it and listen to the great advice instead of just hearing the marketing slogan.

We all have those long-forgotten To Do lists, those tasks we are “eventually” going to do. Take today and Just Do It for something.

Just Do It (Today)

I have found that the more you put things off, the less likely they are to happen. Stop making excuses and do something today that you have been wanting to do. If you get in the habit of doing things right away you can change your way of thinking and become a person of action.

Just Do It (Be Active)

The general idea behind this is to be active instead of passive or inert. Stop watching the world do things around you, stop being a passive watcher and be a doer.

Just Do It (Something, Anything)

Stop making excuses, stop feeling tired, stop placing blame. There is nothing stopping you from doing what you want. Find your it and just do it. Start small or start big, just pick something. Make sure you see it all the way through and finish it. In that sense, starting small can be a good idea because you can build on your accomplishments. Sometimes, however, you need to totally shake things up and find something big to do.

So my Logan Challenge for you today is to find something and Just Do It. Comment here and let me know what you did and how you feel.

Parenting Tip – White Washcloths

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This is a really simple tip for parents of young children. When kids are first in a high chair and starting to eat solid foods they make a huge mess and it is a big job to clean up after them. We started using paper towels and odd rags, but nothing worked real great. The tip is to go to your local linen store (I don’t remember which ones have gone out of business and which ones are still around!) and get about 20 basic white washcloths. They should come in big multipacks and are very cheap. We always had a big stack of washcloths available and they made cleanup so much easier! They are soft for the kid’s faces and hands and also very effective on tables and the floor. You also keep all those paper towels out of the landfill. Keep a bag of dirty washcloths near your laundry machine and when you get low just wash the whole bag of dirty ones. It saves paper towels and is much easier and cleaner. This one tip has saved us a ton of time over the years with three kids in high chairs. As the washcloths got completely frayed and worn out we periodically picked the worst ones and moved them to the garage for use as dirty rags and bought another multipack to replace them.

Now as our kids have gotten older and we don’t need them for mealtime, they have turned into general purpose rags and are still useful. Whether they are being use to clean up the cat throwup or if the boys missed the toilet, they are still so handy.

Weight Loss And Weight Control – Part II

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This is a followup to my previous post Weight Loss And Weight Control – Part I.

As I discussed previously, I got up over 210 pounds at my heaviest.  I started eating better and excercising and lost a few pounds here and there.  Then I made one change and proceeded to lose 10 pounds in two weeks time.  What was that one thing?  Simple.  I stopped drinking canned soda.  My company – being a hip development shop – provides free soft drinks so we have refrigerators full of soda.  I used to drink 3+ cans of soda a day and in an effort to get healthier I had cut back to only one can a day.  I figured that was ok and I could still lose weight, but boy what a difference that final one can of soda made.  I decided to completely cut out that last can and switch to drinking only water and the occasional juice.  I couldn’t believe the impact!  The pounds melted away!  I was so struck by the difference that one can of soda made that to this day I still don’t drink soda at work.  I drink exclusively water, VitaminWater, and the occasional juice.  I do still drink soda occasionally when I go out to eat, but not on a regular basis.

Also, I discovered a great soda made with cane sugar instead of the high fructose corn syrup crap in regular soda.  It is called Jones pure cane soda and I get mine at our local Target store.  Check them out at www.jonessoda.com.  I like the cream soda flavor.  Be careful because they also sell soda with aspartamine, which I think is terrible.

On that note – before you suggest diet soda, I hate any and all diet sodas for two simple reasons: 1) they taste terrible and 2) the “artificial sweetners” they use are harmful and toxic.  Sounds like a good topic for a future post!

So, my Logan Challenge for you today is to completely cut out soda for a week, a month, or more.  See what the impact is on you and report back here in the comments or email me at logan@loganpaulson.com.