Pretty Cool ... Real Madrid's First Team-Based Fantasy Game

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— Real Madrid C.F. (@realmadriden) December 16, 2014

Just TREMENDOUS ...(Rules of Tweeting)

Happy 1/1/11

I really enjoyed this column by CNBC's Darren Rovell and pass it along in its entirety with a 'rare' tag of "Must Read" for all bloggers and frequent users of Twitter:

By Darren Rovell

Today, I will reach 50,000 followers on Twitter. I’m obviously honored, but the truth is the reason I’ve been able to grow so much in the space in the last year is because of you, my blog readers and my followers. You have told me what you want from me, whether it’s a salary stat or the numbers behind a certain sponsorship. You have given me information for me to tweet out to the masses and you have even proven me wrong. For that, I thank you. As we begin to think about 2011, I think about social media and Twitter in particular and how I can only see a big future for how sports fans will use the site in the coming year. I don’t consider myself the ultimate expert on this topic of course, but I thought I’d try to come up with a list of the most important things I’ve learned about Twitter in the past year. There will be many sports references in here because that's the area I play in, but this advice is obviously pretty generic. If you don't follow me on Twitter, you can find me @darrenrovell.

1. You don’t have a 140 characters, you have 120 at the most
Remember, Twitter is not a monologue, it is a dialogue. You want people to engage with you, you want people to retweet you. If you use all 140 characters, the only choice they have is to click the retweet button, which means they can’t comment on it. I’ve found that my ideal tweets are about 100 characters. Including my 12-letter name, an RT, a space and the @ symbol, that’s 116 characters. My followers then have 24 characters to say what they want. Your number of characters are precious, so use link shortening sites like bit.ly or is.gd to reduce the amount of letters in your tweet.

2. This Isn’t A Popularity Contest
Twitter isn’t Facebook. It’s not a contest to collect as many friends as possible (I’ll follow you, if you follow me). If you genuinely use Twitter to follow others, you don’t want to clog your timeline with useless banter. Some people collect followers in order to grow their following. Don't be in this business. If you are to use Twitter effectively, it's not a popularity contest. I have found that if you truly are interested in using your Twitter feed, you can follow up to about 700 people. After that, a Twitter feed isn’t going to be an effective tool for you. Pare down your list every month so that you will be able to keep up with your changing interests and people who you realize aren't providing you with useful information. If you pique interest, people will follow you. Trust me.

3. Follow The Right People

Many who say that Twitter is a waste of time simply don’t take the time to follow the right people. Twitter is actually a time saver. If you follow the right people, you will be more efficient since the news is coming to you, rather than you going to it. You will find out news and information faster than if you went to search it out yourself. The easy way to follow the right people is to look at who is following you. They also might be worth following and since Twitter's "Find People" and “Who To Follow” tabs are shaky at best, it's often one of the best ways to make sure you are following the right people.

4. Know Who Follows You And Why People Follow You
You are followed for a reason. If it’s just your group of friends, you can write inside jokes all day that they’ll all understand. If you are followed by people outside your circle, doing that will only encourage them to leave. If you’re a comedian, be funny. If you don’t have something funny to say, don’t tweet it. If you’re a sports writer, tweet about sports, not what is at your family’s Thanksgiving table. Stick to your strengths.

5. Personal Tweets Are Fine Every Once In A While
I’m a sports business reporter, so I know that my followers rely on me to tweet about sports business. But I also love food and love to just observe strange things in life. This week, I went to the supermarket and saw a product I really loved. I took a picture of it, tweeted it out and it got more than 5,500 views. I want people to understand who I am as a person. I try to achieve a 90-10 ratio. Ninety percent of my tweets are going to be about sports business, the rest could be personal though definitely pass the interesting test. Former tennis player Justin Gimelstob tweeted a picture of his earwax once. It works because people follow him because he’s eccentric.

6. Don’t Be Afraid To Have More Than One Account
If I’m following you because I like your take on college football, I don’t want to all of sudden be bombarded by a stream of play by play tweets for UAB basketball because you graduated from there. If you want to, have a fan account that focuses on an area that isn’t the main reason people are following you, open up another account. Trust me, it will save you from losing followers. Colleges especially have to be careful with this. I follow a Northwestern fan feed because I want to follow play-by-play of the games on my Twitter feed. But Northwestern only provides a fan feed that allows me to see play-by-play of all teams. I don't want baseball and softball scores cluttering my feed. In this case, feeds should be broken down by sports. Companies not only need to be on Twitter, but they have to have a variety of different usernames. Some people just want coupons or rebates and they don’t want to hear about every store opening. No one said you could only have one name.

7. People Love Pictures
Some of my most successful tweets have been when I’ve simply taken a picture off the television. Like this shot of Patrick Ewing eating popcorn without his hands, while Orlando Magic coach Stan Van Gundy tried to give his halftime speech. To think that I just happened to catch that moment in time off the TV, and it was funny enough that 10,000 people viewed, is pretty remarkable.

8. Know When To Tweet

If you are tweeting during a big game, it’s obviously appropriate to tweet immediately, but if you have something that you consider gold, you should hold it until you have the greatest audience. Just because Twitter is an instant publishing tool doesn’t mean you have to publish everything instantly. I don't have any data to support overall Twitter trends, but — if all else is equal — I find that my content is most likely to get retweeted during the 9:30 am to 11 am ET timeframe. My tweets written before 7 am and after 10 pm are usually fighting the odds. That's why it's smart to save tweets for the perfect time.

9. There's No Such Thing As Tweeting Too Much
Are there a number of tweets per day that make people unfollow you? I've had people tell me that you can only tweet so much before people get tired with you clogging up their timeline. Not true. If you tweet quality, no one will stop following you. People don't get annoyed with your number of tweets. They get annoyed with the number of your tweets that are bad.

10. The Collective Twitterverse Is Smarter Than You
Use Twitter as a tool. Is what you think about a certain something indicative of how this nation thinks about it? If you want to understand more about this read James Surowiecki’s brilliant book, "The Wisdom Of Crowds.” It was written in 2004, but if you read it today and think about Twitter, it makes so much more sense. If I’m not sure about how I feel about something, I often poll my Twitter followers and many times I instantaneously discover that my opinion is in minority. Read your @ mail. That's not only to see who retweeted you, but also for suggestions on content. People who have six people following them smartly send me things to consider for a retweet. A guy sent me a cool Zamboni desk garbage. I tweeted it and gave him credit. Another follower of mine asked what was in the Under Armour combine gift bag? I found out, blogged it, and tweeted out the link. All they want is you to give them credit by mentioning their username. That’s not a lot to ask for the intellectual capital they are giving me in exchange. Sports teams and companies use Twitter to tell you what they are doing. They should also use the collective wisdom of the crowds on Twitter to find out what you think they should do. You might be the director of marketing for a team and you might think you’ve dreamed up every promotion. Well guess what? The totality of your fan base can do better than you. Don’t be scared to cross that bridge.

11. Don’t Trust Everything That Is Tweeted
If you are retweeting something that involves news, make sure the original tweet is from a reputable source. I've been on the wrong end of a retweet gone bad and it's not pretty. I even remember the date I did it because it burns that much. As more and more people retweet it, Twitter becomes like a game of telephone. The original source gets taken off and you are then left being the one that is reporting the news. Someone tweeted that ESPN Radio was saying that Magic Johnson was going to buy the Jacksonville Jaguars and move them to Los Angeles. When I contacted the person who tweeted it out, he told me that he wasn’t sure, but his friend told him that ESPN Radio said it. The guy didn't seem to care because he wasn't a journalist and there wasn't any consequences for his misfire. Others aren't as fortunate.

12. People Want To Laugh
No matter what you cover, or how you choose to tweet, humor is highly valued on Twitter. There's something magical about one sentence that can make you laugh. When one of my tweets gets on the front page of Twitter, odds are it made people laugh.

13. Walk Away
Unlike people that blog, where you have to continue to feed the beast, you can walk away from Twitter every once in a while. People won’t stop following you if you step back. It’s healthy to do that every once in a while, though I can’t tell you the last time I did that.

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The fine line of Blogging and "Tweeting" with a purpose ...

A lot of employers do not condone 'blogging' or using the Twitter application (tweeting) on company time. Other actually encourage it and pay their writers/bloggers/employees extra to do so.

Sports leagues, conferences, franchises, coaches, team personnel and - pretty much everyone in the business - are trying to figure out the best policies to establish. And, as time marches on, those who stand still, monitor the situation, or, worse yet, take the issue under advisement - all stand to lose the most.

With the opening of NBA training camps, the topic of social networking - sometimes on-the-job activity - is solidly in the news. The Miami Heat issued a team policy and it merited coverage from the largest news gathering operation in the world, the Associated Press.

Read on, as I like to state:

Heat telling players: No Twitter at work

By TIM REYNOLDS (AP)

MIAMI — At 10:05 Monday morning, Dwyane Wade told his 96,348 followers on Twitter that he was heading to work.

"The first drive in to the beginning of the season," Wade wrote.

That was fine with the Miami Heat.

But there won't be any updates by "dwadeofficial" from work.

Miami players can no longer participate in social networking while at the arena, home or away. Many Miami players are accomplished tweeters, often sending messages to each other at all hours of the day and night. But practice or game times, it's not allowed.

"We'll have strict rules on it," Heat coach Erik Spoelstra said Monday at the team's media day. "The NBA has put in strict rules about it. Social media, we will not accept that in our building during office hours. That's the way we'll look at it when we're coming to practice, to shootarounds and to games. We're coming to work and we're coming to get a job done. That's not time for social media."

There wasn't any known instance of Heat players tweeting during games last year. Charlie Villanueva created a stir last season when he sent a message on his feed during halftime of a game when he was with the Milwaukee Bucks, and teams are expecting to receive formal guidelines from the NBA about Twitter and things of that nature.

Plenty of other teams, both pro and college, have similar rules in place.

"It's fascinating how fast technology is moving forward and how people will be able to use it," said Spoelstra, who has a Twitter account but does not post onto the feed. "But you have to be educated now about it."

Twitter was a burden for Heat forward Michael Beasley this summer. He closed his accounts twice, the second time after posting two messages that left some concerned that he was depressed over a looming 30-day stay in a Houston rehabilitation facility.

Beasley said last week that he's done with social networking, that he doesn't need it in his life.

Wade has no complaints, however, with either Twitter in general or the Heat policy.

"When you come to work, you come to work," Wade said. "You can tweet before, you can tweet after. It's not addicting like where I'm going to take a bathroom break, go downstairs and tweet. I think people take it a little too far with that. But I think it's very good to have communications with your fans, personally. A lot of people, you can see them in a different light."

Most Heat players who Tweet — Dorell Wright, Mario Chalmers, Quentin Richardson and Jermaine O'Neal among them — say they expect to hit the send button less now anyway.

Miami formally opens training camp Tuesday, and two-a-day practices won't leave much time for anything.

"I tweeted so much this summer because it was the summertime," Wright said. "I'd come in here, handle my business and I had the rest of the day to myself to tweet. I enjoy it because I'm able to open up and talk to fans and different people."

O'Neal was leery at first with Twitter. He opened an account, then basically let it sit idle for several weeks before getting the bug.

His Twitter account shows he posted 13 times in about an hour on Sept. 21, then hadn't posted again before Monday.

"In the workplace, it's too much," O'Neal said. "Games, it's ridiculous. Leisure time, that's on you. You should be able to tweet or whatever you want to do when you're home, but bringing it into locker rooms or bringing it into games, that's too much because basically you're not focusing on the task at hand."

O'Neal checks his Twitter often and tries to respond to people — even the thousands he doesn't know.

"The problem is, you can't respond to everybody," O'Neal said. "And you get cursed out when you don't respond to everybody."

Twitter "D" and Twitter Dumb?

C'mon, admit it. For all of us, it's been "on the job training" with regard to all the many social media platforms. Prodigy and Compuserve became basic email became AOL, became Twitter, Facebook and so on and so forth. It progressed to the point where every computer-literate person on the face of the earth is wasting unimaginable hours of each and every 24-hour day by reading email, making incorrect assumptions or having a comminique 'lost in translation' over the quick, 'on the run' get it out and done, cover-your-ass fix of email.

I am THOROUGHLY convinced that the Internet and email boom - which hit offices and the general public in the early to mid-90s, then the process took about 12 years to self implode. We now have a total DISASTER on our hands. People don't talk to each other anymore. They point fingers, send emails to cover their butts at work, try to get on the record if they agree or disagree and then say, "see I told you so." when things go wrong after the fact. Many of the BIGTIME problems have to be attributed to W and his cast of characters (Cheney riding shotgun, Rumsfeld, etc), but most of the blame should be focused RIGHT in the MIRROR. Yes, you. Me. Our bosses and our co-workers. Our friends, who "invite" us to parties via Facebook, rather than pick-up the phone and call. C'mon folks. Let's get back to the real world. Use email for what it was intended for. Answering a quick question.

Use the Internet for entertainment, just like radio, TV, Cable TV, Direct TV, whatever.

Don't use it as your major form of communication.

And, one other thing...PLEASE Don't use it to ask your family or friends for TICKETS!!!

Pick up the phone. Or - better yet - do it in person over a cup of coffee in the AM, or lunch or a post work refreshment.

Read the story below for a "Different" take on my viewpoint. Then, you decide which is right. Or which is an illusion? (Moodies, Breathe deep).


See this for an interesting blog on Twitter:

Putting Twitter’s World to Use

The first reaction many people have to Twitter is befuddlement. Why would they want to read short messages about what someone ate for breakfast?

It’s a reasonable question, The New York Times’s Claire Cain Miller writes. Twitter unleashes the diarist in its 14 million users, who visited its site 99 million times last month to read posts tapped out with cellphones and computers.

Individually, many of those 140-character “tweets” seem inane.

But taken collectively, the stream of messages can turn Twitter into a surprisingly useful tool for solving problems and providing insights into the digital mood. By tapping into the world’s collective brain, researchers of all kinds have found that if they make the effort to dig through the mundane comments, the live conversations offer an early glimpse into public sentiment — and even help them shape it.

Companies like Starbucks, Whole Foods and Dell can see what their customers are thinking as they use a product, and the companies can adapt their marketing accordingly. Last week in Moldova, protesters used Twitter as a rallying tool while outsiders peered at their tweets to help them understand what was happening in that little-known country.

And over the weekend, Amazon.com learned how important it was to respond to the Twitter audience. After one author noticed that Amazon had reclassified books with gay and lesbian themes as “adult” and removed them from the main search and sales rankings, a protest broke out on blogs and Twitter. The company felt compelled to respond despite the Easter holiday, initially saying the problem was due to a “glitch in our system” but later blaming a “ham-fisted cataloging error” that affected more than 57,000 books dealing with health and sex.

Soon, machines could twitter as much as people. Corey Menscher, a graduate student at New York University, developed the Kickbee, an elastic band with vibration sensors that his pregnant wife wore to alert Twitter each time the baby kicked: “I kicked Mommy at 08:52 PM on Fri, Jan 2!” Mr. Menscher is now considering selling the product.

Pairing sensors with Twitter leads some to think Twitter could be used to send home security alerts or tell doctors when a patient’s blood sugar or heart rate climbs too high. In the aggregate, such real-time data streams could aid medical researchers.

Already doctors use Twitter to ask for help and share information about procedures. At Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, surgeons and residents twittered throughout a recent operation to remove a brain tumor from a 47-year-old man who has seizures.

“A portion of the skull is being removed to allow access to the dura, the lining of the brain,” an early tweet said. Medical residents and curious laymen following online asked the doctors what music they were listening to (Loreena McKennitt, a Celtic singer), whether the patient felt pain in the brain (no, just pressure) and how big the tumor was (the size of a golf ball). As is convention on Twitter, they tagged all their tweets with a keyword so anyone could search for the keyword and read the stream of posts.

“Twitter lets people know what’s going on about things they care about instantly, as it happens,” Evan Williams, Twitter’s chief executive and co-founder, told The Times. “In the best cases, Twitter makes people smarter and faster and more efficient.”

Mr. Williams, along with the other founders, Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, first envisioned Twitter as an easy way to stay in touch with people you already know.

In 2006, when Twitter was just starting, the three men felt a small earthquake in San Francisco. They each reached for their phones to twitter about it and discovered tweets from others in the city. At that moment, it dawned on them that Twitter might be most useful for something else — a frontline news report, not just for friends, but for anyone reading.

Indeed, the news-gathering promise of Twitter was most evident during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November and when a jetliner landed in the Hudson River in January. People were twittering from the scenes before reporters arrived.

The attention the service received helped it nearly double the number of new users in the last month, making Twitter the third-largest online social network, behind Facebook and MySpace, according to Compete, a Web analytics company.

“Twitter reverses the notion of the group,” Paul Saffo, the Silicon Valley futurist, told The Times. “Instead of creating the group you want, you send it and the group self-assembles.”

Corporations often use Twitter for sales pitches. Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks and TurboTax, monitors Twitter for people writing about Mint, a personal finance Web site that competes with its Quicken Online. Intuit then writes to them and offers its service.

Even small businesses find Twitter useful. For example, Mary F. Jenn, of True Massage and Wellness in San Francisco, twitters when masseuses have same-day openings in their schedules and offers discounts. The spa is often fully booked within several hours.

But Twitter’s most productive use has been for businesses that want to peer into the minds of their customers, reading their immediate reactions to a product. Dell noticed customers complaining on Twitter that the apostrophe and return keys were too close together on the Dell Mini 9 laptop. So Dell fixed the problem on the Dell Mini 10.

At Starbucks, customers used to complain by leaving notes in suggestion boxes. Now they can also post their complaints or suggestions on Twitter, where Brad Nelson, who writes the company’s Twitter updates, tracks what people are saying about Starbucks online.

Last month, rumors surfaced that Starbucks would not send coffee to troops in Iraq in protest of the war. Mr. Nelson shot them down, twittering, “This is not true. Get the facts here,” with a link to Starbucks’s refutation of the rumor.

Some developers are creating tools to help companies keep an eye on the buzz. Akshay Java, a scientist at Microsoft, is trying to figure out a way to identify which experts are most influential on given topics by automatically analyzing the content of their tweets and who is in their Twitter network. Companies like Microsoft could use that information to figure out which twitterers they should contact to create buzz about a new product.

However, for Twitter to be truly useful as a research tool, more people will have to start using it. If it collected a more representative slice of what the world is thinking, Twitter could enable academics and scientists to track epidemics, for instance.

To make that easier, Twitter will soon add a search box to the home page so users can search for terms like “earthquake” or “flu” and get any tweets about those topics in their Twitter feeds.

To continue growing, Twitter will also need to earn meaningful revenue, which the two-year-old company has yet to do. Twitter hopes to charge companies like Starbucks for features that help them communicate with and learn more about their customers, the founders said.

As the company taps into the $35 million it recently raised from two venture capital firms in Silicon Valley — on top of the $20 million it previously raised — Mr. Williams sees evidence that his service has started to find a more utility-minded, mainstream audience.

He points to people using it to find gasoline in Atlanta during a gas shortage last fall. “It was so far from sharing what you had for breakfast — yet it only works because it’s the same place where people talk about breakfast,” he told The Times.