Twitter quickstart: Your first 21 tweets

If you need to stake a claim to your Twitter identity, but you don’t know what to tweet about, here’s an easy way to get your Tweeting underway. You don’t need to look like the world’s most longstanding Twitterer (after all, Oprah just started tweeting last week!), but an empty Twitter feed is just, well, a little forlorn.So I’ve taken the liberty of writing your first 21 tweets for you.

How the social web can nourish your most personal relationship

The process of strengthening a relationship by working hard together; by facing, nurturing and celebrating your successes and challenges together — that’s an experience that’s open to any couple, or indeed any relationship, that integrates the creative and communicative possibilities of the social web. Here are some of the ways you can use the social web to bring the energy of creative collaboration into your relationship.

Using online contests as a marketing tool

If you’re running online contests to promote your work, you want to encourage people to participate as widely as possible. Here’s how to create a compelling and fun contest.

Status update: Twittering your way to effective (and expressive) communication

Like many forms of online conversation, status updates make it easy to confuse the expressive value of communication with the effective value of communicaiton. I’m concerned about the expressive value of communication when I’m “getting something off my chest”, “speaking my truth”, or engaging in some form of creative expression. I’m concerned about the effective value of communication when I’m trying to get you to hear me, listen to me, or understand me.

Wrap your brand in reflected glory

Someone needs to tell the folks at Glad: Unless your customers pay for the privilege of wearing your logo, don't build an online community around your brand.

Will the real Alexandra Samuel please stand up?

I knew this charade couldn't last forever. Like lonelygirl15 and fake Steve Jobs before me, I went to great efforts to create a compelling illusion: not only an Alexandra Samuel blog, but a consistent profile on every online community site from del.icio.us to Facebook. Even a complete fake company with me as the fake CEO.

But today, the illusion is at an end. Darrell Houle has unmasked mHighrise tour by 37signalse as…..Suzanna Cavatrio, copywriter for Enormicom.

Huh?

That's right, Darrell came across my alter ego on the tour page for Highrise, a CRM product from 37Signals, the makers of Basecamp. Check it out:

Highrise tour by 37signals

I'm happy to take this re-purposing as a sign that someone at 37Signals saw my obsessive blog post about Basecamp workflow. Or maybe it's a tribute to the talented man behind the camera — Kris Krug, who took the original photo. Maybe this is kk+'s chance to become official photographer for 37Signals?

 

Is Facebook trying to kill you?

From Blade Runner to the Matrix, from Star Trek’s Borg to Battlestar Galactica’s Cylons, we’ve spent a lot of time imagining the day when our super-strong, super-smart robots get tired of vacuuming and decide they want to rule the world. That’s given me an opportunity to consider a more immediate threat: Facebook. Not just Facebook, actually, but all the social networks and online communities to which we give our eyeballs, braincells, hearts and dollars. Could these online communities constitute the machine threat that sci-fi has taught us to anticipate?