I really don’t like pointing the finger, but this company just approaches social media in such a horrible style, that I want you all to see how NOT to do it. First of all, they advertise with social media services. Now, the funny thing is, that they have a facebook link at top and left of their site, with different like amounts, confusing the user? Hell yeah. Second, you can’t “find” them on facebook, because their page-name only directs to nyndesigns.com

On twitter, a couple of messages (often the same) sprouts up by multiple people. What could be going on here, is that a bot with some random people-stock pictures is tweeting all their pre-defined news messages over and over again, none of them responds when you tweet at them, neither the @nyndesigns account. I assume these are blind bot accounts, because they tweet the same messages over and over again, trying to over-over-advertise for the posts and services of nyndesigns.com

The funny thing is, that Nyndesigns advertists with a message like:

Professional web consultation services @nyndesigns Windsor, Ontario, Canada

Which does not add up with their behaviour on social media at all.

ground rules they are breaking:

1. Be available for questions and correspondence
2. Don’t repeat yourself
3. Be authentic

Below you see the confusing different amounts of likes on their facebook page:

Here’s a potential list of Nyndesigns potential fake twitter accounts:

• https://twitter.com/#!/denahall8
• https://twitter.com/#!/katherinejtaylo
• https://twitter.com/#!/EliseBynum
• https://twitter.com/#!/katherinejtaylo
• https://twitter.com/#!/AllieHofer
• https://twitter.com/#!/DavidRCastillo
• https://twitter.com/#!/SarahCWoo
• https://twitter.com/#!/haroldiglesia14
• https://twitter.com/#!/calvinscholl12
• https://twitter.com/#!/JuanMckeon
• https://twitter.com/#!/edithccole
• https://twitter.com/#!/sarahgraha
• https://twitter.com/#!/NathanEGrable
• https://twitter.com/#!/kathleenbryan14
• https://twitter.com/#!/williamallen12
• https://twitter.com/#!/lorikthomas
• https://twitter.com/#!/johnnymoylan12
• https://twitter.com/#!/ryanuryan
• https://twitter.com/#!/charlesboard12

and many more, able to be found on: https://twitter.com/#!/search/@nyndesigns

UPDATE: I just filed a spam report on twitter.com about this matter, including the information above.

picture: dandy logo

So there is this great new social network… Waaait, that’s so not the point about Diaspora. Remember all the discussions about how facebook saves all your data and google plus connects everything you do on google plus to your search queries? Yeah? Don’t like it?

Now that’s where Diaspora comes along. First of all Diaspora is not one single website where you can sign up. It’s a network of connected servers, which results in Diaspora.
Diaspora is like a street system compared to a go cart park. Now, the metaphor at the current time is a little bad, because the go cart parks like facebook and google plus have millions of users, while Diaspora is fairly small at the moment, but let’s go and change that later.
Like when choosing a provider for your email or your webhost, you now have a chance to decide where you want your social profile to be hosted. There’s a list at podupti.me where you can choose your “home pod” (pod = server on the Diaspora network, you’ll be able to connect with everybody, even if they’re not on your home pod).

Why join?

• to ensure your data stay with you and only the people you share them with
• to easily publish updates to twitter and facebook at the same time, if you want to
• to meet new and interesting people
• to invite your current friends from facebook or twitter
• to feel free

Join Now

after that be sure to
find me on Diaspora*

When joined I recommend you add tags for topics you’re interested in and update your status with a message like:

Hey everyone, I’m kinda #newhere. I’m interested in #photography, #webdesign, #design, #PHP, #JavaScript, #jQuery, #Wordpress, #drupal and #git.

Clients

A client is an application you use twitter through. A great example for that is tweetdeck, because it has multiple columns and you can get it on Windows and MacOS, because it is written in Adobe AIR. I like to keep track of my friends timeline, my mentions and a facebook newsfeed. The fourth column changes between different lists and searches.

Link shorteners

If you’ve been tweeting and including links in your tweets, you may have noticed that links take a big chunk of the overall tweet length, which is limited to 140 characters after all. Link shorteners will be your friend. There are multiple services for that out there, I personally use bit.ly, because it’s widely spread and easy to integrate to tweetdeck or available as a plugin for Chrome/Chromium.

Analysis

There are different tools for analyzing your or others accounts. A service which is fairly new and very powerful is Klout. It calculates how you impact twitter with your tweets upon how much reaction like mentions or retweets you produce. It also analyzes your style, if you mostly tweet links, mention other users and so on. There is a ranking plugin available for Chrome to see other peoples Klout score directly on the twitter website.

Connect

I can only recommend you chain your facebook profile to your twitter account and let your friends there know what you’re posting on twitter. Just go to the twitter application.

These were the first five days of How to Twitter. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to comment Thanks to everybody who followed through so far!

Content is king,

don’t kill it with boredom.

It’s been a long time since my last status update, so here we go: looking for breakfast.

When you’re a blogger, you should add some personality to your blog, that’s correct. If you don’t have a blog and are worried that your twitter account has some spider webs on it, use it as motivation. Get up, do something, tweet that.

Duplicate content is a fool

Of course it is, so don’t retweet somebody a lot of your followers are following, it will just annoy them and flood their timeline.
Furthermore, don’t link the same post/site twice without telling you have tweeted it before. Include a memorable title, or users will be disappointed the second time they visit one of your links, they believed to be new.

Don’t hate

All you miserable maggots will bite to dust and I’ll impale you with a bamboo stick!

If you try to stand out as a professional, discuss, don’t harass. What you tweet about is very sensitive. Don’t tweet that you hate work, when you just got hired by a firm and you have no side-projects, don’t put a bounty on peoples head, imagine your audience sitting in front of you. To get away from you, they just have to click unfollow instead of leaving the room and giving you the possibility to question why, like in the physical world.

Don’t whine too much. It’s very irritating to see people bitching around all the time. To be on the subject and being still critical is not impossible

For further bad tweets see: Top 10 worst tweets

This is a lot depending on what you want to achieve. A podcaster I follow uses twitter to organise with the people he meets around Germany. Others promote their newest content, their firms launched products, etc. I’ll just leave out talking about puppies or that you just had breakfast, because these you should do rarely, if you’re not breeding dogs or a dedicated food blogger.  Your bio(graphy) is also important, so potential followers get a quick overview, what they’re going to read when they follow you. I’ll just use my current as an example:

PhotoDesignCode-Junkie, currently at the Nordic Multimedia Academy. Free for shootings and projects, speak to me in: EN/DE/DA. Follow me for more insights.

I consider it short, summarising my interests, revealing my current occupation, that I’m open for work, trilingual and inviting to follow me.

Try to connect with people you know in real life, people from the same area or field of interest. This will give you opportunities to jump into conversations, help or just get interesting updates. As this is a medium that leans so close against the pulse of the net as no other, being there when something happens or at least on a daily basis, you should make routine out of checking your account, mentions and retweets on a daily basis.