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Twitter made me a better writer

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I have been writing professionally since college…over a decade ago. My best opportunities for honing my writing came from limiting word or character count – whether on grant applications, articles, or even forms. So it is not surprising to me that the character count on twitter helped improve my writing. If it hasn’t already done the same for you, here are some tips and tricks for getting your idea across in 140 characters or less.

1. Link out. Use blogs or other spaces where ideas and information are expressed fully. 🙂 When linking, provide enough keywords with the link that people know to follow the link and what they will get when there. Which keywords? Who, what, where, when, why – right? What audience(s) is it for? Is it location specific? Does it have a deadline? What folksonomy category is it in?

2. Get mathy. Use punctuation adjustments to trim down character counts. Works when you have a solid statement within 15 characters of 140. Turn and into + or & etc. Turn a series of item comma space item comma space and item comma space into item+item+item. Note, you can also quickly cut out articles: a, an, and the are often unnecessary.

3. Love action. As a poet, I was taught to put the power into verbs and nouns, not descriptors. Trim out superfluous words and put the energy and attention on the noun and verb. Who is it and what are they doing or being? What is the test for superfluous words? If you remove them, is it still clear what you mean? Can you combine or reword it more effectively? I often edit out the use of helper verbs. “I tried to tell Liz about shortening verb strings” can be more simply stated as “I told Liz about shortening verb strings.”

4. Crossword size. After a decade in academia, I tend to know more big words than small ones. It took me some time to figure out the short word equivalents. If you are good at crosswords, you have a strong short word vocabulary. Turn utilize back into use please. Shorten is better as trim, etc.

5. Abbreviate or contract. I hesitate to suggest it, as abbreviations can be misunderstood when speaking across different audiences. But IM and text messaging rang in the era of abbreviated dialog. If you find pronouns to be critical to include, shorten our to r and your to ur. Again, you can get mathy and say be4 or B4 instead of before. I suggest you look at the other options before falling back to abbreviation, but it really depends on your audience and their comfort with such practices. What are they doing?

Test to be sure, if read aloud, your tweet is understandable with the abbreviations.

What other methods do you use to trim your expressions into tweets?

Social Media Fundraising Success

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Epic Change ran a fundraising campaign over twitter this thanksgiving – #tweetsgiving!
They raised over their target of $10,000 in 48 hours. The money is intended for building a classroom in Tanzania. While the lure of social media promise for fundraising continues to elude many, there are a few hopeful and stellar examples of success.

I believe this campaign was successful for the following reasons (there may be more, but this is my sense of it right now).

1.Tangible concrete goal – raising this amount for a project is more compelling for most small donors than contributing to a general effort of an organization. A classroom in Tanzania. Every $10 is a brick, and we need 1000 bricks. Thus the donor may ask themselves how many bricks do they want to invest.

2.Trusted organization/people – Epic Change has been on twitter with a sustaining present for a long enough time to be recognizable to many – and draw in visibility through a network of trusted connections. One has to have the inner network trusting you before you can scale to second tier networks of scale. I could do a whole post just on how to establish trust in these networks. For now, I will just say that Epic Change has been following the rule of give to get by joining conversations and engaging their network in non-monetary sharing consistently.

3.Pass It On dynamic – the rules of tweetsgiving were clearly stated in the website put together just for this effort. They clearly encourage passing on the tweetsgiving to others. Furthermore, passing it on was facilitated by the core with ample thank yous and other acknowledgments. Additionally, donors are listed on the site as people to follow on twitter. There were also individual outreach efforts to get advocates for Epic Change to evangelize the the effort.

4.Tapping into Gratitude – the effort was tied into a holiday of gratitude. People give more when they are reminded of their own abundance – that they have enough. Thanksgiving is a good holiday for that reminder. And tweetsgiving reinforced this connection by asking people to post what they are grateful for along with the tag #tweetsgiving.

5.Event Bigger than Project Focus – sharing gratitude is a general activity around this holiday, so #tweetsgiving gave people a chance to share what they wanted to share in a way that really works on twitter. Tweeple like tagging for the aggregation of many voices about one topic.

6.Well-networked Core Team – this campaign was created and implemented by a team of folks rallying around the cause who are avid twitter users with networks of their own, including many vital influencers. This means the reach of the project was sufficient for success.

7.Clear timeline – the project was not open-ended or even long term. It was 48 hours. While there is probably not any clear urgency on the school being built necessitating a quick campaign, the campaign itself had a focused energy by being short-term. Attention to the cause did not require ongoing commitment of participants or even ongoing attention. Go in, twitter, make a gift, forward the action with a gratitude, and within 48 hours it is over. Meaning made, finances collected, and forward to the next activity for all involved. (note this is also cost effective for the fundraising team)

What do you think made it successful? How can you adopt these strategies in your fundraising and resource development?

Entering Social Spaces Online

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Seems like each week there are new social media spaces to join and participate in. And lots of people help others learn and adopt online social practices. Each space has its own nuance on social practices. There are general rules of thumb, sure. But each site – even a cluster within a site – is specific in the way it encourages flows of connection and information, and thus which practices are encouraged. So how do you know what to do where?

I see lots of do and don’t lists, and they are great. Very helpful if you want a rulebook to follow. But if you want to learn the skill of adapting as you enter spaces, the work you do needs to go deeper into your practice. What questions should you ask yourself when joining and contributing to online social spaces?

Be strategic. Social media is a huge flow of information and people often very loosely knit together. What do you want to foster? Disregard fads of tools and spaces. What you do with your extremely precious time needs to be purposeful. Do you want: friends, information, a thriving network to use as a resource, marketing your [fill in the blank]? How will you know when you have that? How will you maintain it over time? Social spaces online just like physical social spaces require your attention to stay alive and flourishing.

Listen. Like I shared above, each space has its own social norms. Yes, there are general rules, but if you lurk before blasting posts, you can get a sense of how often to post, ways to appreciate others, ways to find interesting people and ideas, ways to avoid trouble, what puts people off… How do people behave in this space using this tool? What best practices can you collect? Sense into what is working for you in other people’s social practice. What gets you engaged there? How can you offer or connect, mirroring what worked for you?

Applaud. In speech we often give praise or acknowledgment with our faces. We nod or even just keep eye-contact. There are zillions of body clues. And they don’t show online. At all. Not even with emoticons. How can you show you are listening? How can you show that you are giving your attention to someone or something? How can you show you are a contributor? How can you help others shine? Where can you quickly, easily, and usefully connect people, ideas, and resources? If the general principle of social relations is truly get what you give, then what are you giving?

What questions wander through your mind when you are visiting new online social spaces?
What really irritates you as a social practice?
How do you quickly and easily sense a spammer, a connector, a maven, an influencer?

Your answers help you figure how how you want to be online. And they create an opportunity for you to be genuine in your practice.

Here are some resources for you that I saw on twitter today:
Top 10 Reasons Brands should Listen to Social Media
The Creation of Twitter Best Practices: Round 1