The following list was created by Jeff Cohen, who blogs at DigitalPapercuts.com, and Kipp Bodnar, who blogs at DigitalCapitalism.com, and yes, it is completely coincidental that both blogs have digital as the first word. Since Twitter is still on the top of everyone’s mind, we thought it would be a good time to document 101 uses for Twitter. Since this list was meant to be both fun and educational, we want you to share it with your readers and indicate how you have used Twitter. There are certainly many other uses for Twitter, but we wanted to compile a list that could be created in under one hour. Please feel free to add your own uses in the comments.

The rules for this post are the following:

1. Please post this on your blog in its entirety
2. Bold or underline your uses for Twitter
3. Add the tag twitter101 to the post
4. Make sure you link back to both of the originating posts: Kipp’s and Jeff’s
5. Add a comment to this post if you like
6. Tweet your post with the hashtag #twitter101

101 Uses for Twitter
1. Answer the Question “What are you doing?”
2. Tell Your Friends Your Going To Jail
3. Alert Your Family That your Plane Has Crash Landed in The Husdon
4. Explain To The World What You’re Eating
5. Announce You’re Currently Peeing
6. Your Chair Can Tell The World You’re Farting
7. Plants Can Tweet You For More Water
8. Say Something That Gets You Fired
9. Gather A Group Of Friends For Drinks
10. Say Something That Gets A Job Offer Pulled
11. Say Something That Angers a Client
12. Complain about a Product or Service
13. Ask for Free Stuff
14. Obsess about Bacon
15. Tweet for Your Dog or Cat
16. Showcase an Endless Array of Self-Portraits
17. Meet People at a Concert
18. Share News
19. Report from a Natural Disaster
20. Pimp Your Blog Links
21. Pimp Your Mom
22. Ask for 1,000,000 Followers
23. Announce the Song You are Listening To
24. Tell People How Awesome Your Macbook Is
25. Wonder How This Twitter Thing Works
26. Gratuitous Cursing
27. Comment That You Are Sitting At Your Desk
28. Make Fun of People Who Use PCs
29. Complain about How Facebook is Ripping Off Twitter
30. Wondering if Anyone Uses MySpace Anymore
31. Ask Someone to Marry You
32. Report on Your Blind Date
33. Tell Everyone What You Thought About the Latest Blockbuster Movie
34. Spoil The Ending of a TV Show
35. Thank Someone for Great Customer Service
36. Complain About Bad Customer Service
37. Bemoan The Fact That Traditional Media Doesn’t Get It
38. Share Speaker’s Quotes from Conference
39. Make Fun of People Who Are Not at SXSW
40. Revel That You are Not at SXSW
41. Tell People How Wasted You Are
42. Talk about the Weather
43. Share Heartwarming Stories About Your Kids
44. Link to Photos of Your Vacation
45. Use a Location-Based Service to Tell Everyone about Your Latte, including a photo and a map
46. Post Cute Pictures of Your Pets
47. Meet Members of Your Local Community
48. Sell Stuff
49. Buy Stuff
50. Promote Events
51. Crowdsource Ideas for Things You Get Paid to Know
52. Hire A Freelancer
53. Report on Terrorist Activity
54. Name Drop People You’ve Only Met Online
55. Name Drop People You Are Having Lunch With
56. Send A Message To The President
57. Talk About Which Twitter Desktop App You’re Using
58. Talk About Snuggies
59. Use Stupid Shorthand such as: nom nom, lol, FTW, WTF, etc…
60. Try to Make Others Jealous of How Awesome your City is
61. Pimp The Latest Sci-Fi Trailer
62. Tracking Trends
63. Announce Your Plane has Landed: Wheels Down
64. Review Movies
65. Tell A Story
66. Make a Public Apology
67. Admit You Did Something Stupid
68. Ask for Computer Help
69. Complain about Battery Life
70. Pitch Your Startup to Scoble and Techcrunch
71. Make New Friends
72. Exclaim the Guy/Girl Across the Room is Hot!
73. Argue Politics
74. Wish Twitterville Good Morning
75. Tell your Followers to Have a Good Day
76. Tell the Twitterverse Goodnight
77. Share Quotes
78. Express Your Belief in a Higher Power
79. Avoid Sending E-mail
80. Learn
81. Listen
82. Ask for Help
83. Raise Money for a Charity
84. Share Stats of Social Media’s Growth
85. Auto-Pimp your New Twitter App
86. Auto-DM Welcome New Followers
87. Get a Date
88. Ask for Travel Recommendations
89. Share What You’re Reading Offline
90. Provide Traffic Updates
91. Talks Sports and Update Scores
92. Share Recipes
93. Tell Someone You’re Running Late
94. Find and Share Funny Videos
95. Talk to Your Boss
96. Train Surgeons
97. Make Yourself Look Smart
98. Change the World
99. Bash Microsoft
100. Express your Undying Love for Twitter
101. Retweet

So after a quick count it seems I have done 64 of the #Twitter101. How many have you done?

As the social web grows up, their is a lot of discussions on making money, but not a lot of specifics discussed. Better yet, few examples of companies innovating to increase sales in new ways. E-Commerce is nothing new to the web, but has the web gets social it to has to change.

I stumbled across a great example of a using wisdom of the crowds and the spirit of competition to promote and sell products. Amazon, an e-commerce retailer who has long been know for innovation and its willingness to try new things has started something new with its MP3 download service and its use of Twitter.  If you take a quick look at the image that leads into this post, you will see that Amazon MP3 has started using its Twitter feed differently. Until recent the service’s Twitter feed was only a listing of its daily music sales. This week that changed when they announced #bandbattle.

For #bandbattle Amazon picks two bands and then has followers tweet @ replies for the band they like the most. The band with the most replies will have its records put on sale on Thursday by Amazon.   I love this approach to using competition to determine special sales and the big upside is that with Twitter’s ability to spread word-of-mouth makes it a great promotion platform for the bands. I am not sure if Amazon is taking the loss on the sales, but if it is, it should work to partner with bands for the sales so it can reduce losses as it is providing marketing support.

Check out which band is getting the most votes.

Can this approach work for all companies? Probably not, but is can certainly extend well beyond the music business.

What do you think?

Twitter is really hot right now, which means the number of third-party applications developed using the Twiter API is growing rapidly. One of the largest sectors for growth is the desktop Twitter application market. Most people that use Twitter do so through desktop applications instead of the Twitter web interface. Most Twitter desktop applications are built using Adobe’s AIR platform and use the twitter API to allow users to send and receive messages and use Twitter search.

With the announcement of the Seesmic desktop application the space is beginning to get crowded. So which one should you use? Which on is the best?

Those are two very different questions. All of the major Twitter applications need improvements and depending on the type of Twitter user you are will impact which application you like the best. I am going to go through and list the pros and cons as well as “who” should use the top 4 applications: Tweetdeck, Yahoo Sideline, Seesmic, and Nambu. Additionally, I have included a video walk through of all of the apps if you would like to get some additional feedback.

Note: All of these applications are currently free.

Tweetdeck

Pros: Tweetdeck in recent months has emerged as the gold standard for Twitter desktop applications because of its layout, twitter search features, 12seconds.tv integration and overall design and performance.  When compared to the four apps reviewed in this post Tweetdeck has been in development the longest and as you would suspect has a deep set of features and a refined design. Tweetdeck integrates most of the URL shortening services along with tweet shrink which helps shorten your message to fit the 140 character limit.

Cons/Suggested Improvements: For an app that feels polished and is out of beta, I have had a lot of problems with it crashing in OS X. Additionally Tweetdeck can be a big RAM hog and really slow down your computer. The black color scheme does not blend well with other applications windows and needs to be changed.

Who Should Use It: If you have a powerful laptop and desktop with plenty of RAM and want the feel of a polished app with all the bells and whistles then Tweetdeck is the desktop app for you.

Yahoo Sideline

Pros: Yahoo maybe in decline, but it still has people that build clean useful applications. Sideline which allows a user to track search terms and trending topics on Twitter search is fast and extremely stable for a new app. It is easy to use and the design aside from the color scheme is spot on. The tabs for saved searches work well and will make sense to most users because they are like the tabbed web browsing experience.  The ability to add multiple search terms under one tab is also a key feature.

Cons/Suggested Improvements: Sideline is a one-trick pony, despite the fact that it is a good trick, the lack of other features won’t work for some users. Sideline is strictly search, to reply to a tweet that you see in Sideline, you must click the reply button, but it will take you to your Twitter.com page to actually type and send your reply. Sideline also doesn’t have many other features that regular Twitter users have come to use heavily like direct messages and URL shortening.

Who Should Use It: Sideline really only serves a niche of the Twitter comunity. It is best for companies that want to monitor but not participate in Twitter and for Twitter “power” users that are following too many people and need a better way to filter tweets.

Seesmic

Pros: Seesmic desktop is clean, has the look of an OS X application and is very user friendly. Though just released and still in beta you can tell the app has been well conceived. Seesmic desktop supports multiple twitter accounts, provides single or multi column viewing options, and allows for new columns of saved search terms. Additionally it lets you group people for further filtering and supports many popular URL shortening services. The left hand navigation makes it easier to access columns and is faster than scrolling like Tweetdeck users have to do.  It also features a mute button for the sound effects, which is a nice touch.

Cons/Suggested Improvements: From the start you can tell the Seesmic’s new desktop client is still in beta. It is buggy and needs further tweaking. Having to click to add a link versus just having a blank below the message box will be a turn-off for many Tweetdeck users. For me and many others the inability to adjust column width and placement easily is the biggest usability hurdle the app faces. Columns are not wide enough, but at the same time individual tweets are taking up too much space.

Who Should Use It: People who do or did like using Twhirl will feel at home with this app, as will users who still haven’t fully embraced the design and UI of Tweetdeck. Seesmic though much like Tweetdeck seems friendlier to new users, but will likely not convert many loyal Tweetdeck users.

Nambu

Pros: For Mac users Nambu is a Twitter client that has burst onto the scene and gotten a lot of early adoption and positive feedback. Though Nambu uses columns like Tweetdeck and Seesimc the remainder of the user experience is different. The message composition box is on the bottom instead of the top. One of Nambu’s killer features is the ability to search and filter words within columns, meaning you could see all of your replies about a certain keyword instead of having to hunt and peck for them. Nambu also supports one or multiple column viewing as well as URL shortening. It uses growl to check for software updates. Instead of offering shortcuts such as replies over profile images it has an action icon on the far right of each tweet and action icons at the top of each column.  It is a clean refined app that doesn’t crash and runs really fast.  It also threads replies in the sent messages column which is really nice!

Cons/Suggested Improvements: Nambu is Mac only so it is going to leave a lot of folks out who use PCs. Additionally the compose box should be bigger and I am not a huge fan of having it on the bottom. The action icon with the drop options still seems a little out of place and needs to be refined.

Who Should Use It: Mac owners who want a native desktop app that is lightning fast and packed full of features will love Nambu. Long term users of Tweetdeck and Twhirl will be thrown off by the UI changes but if they can stick it out will be rewarded with a strong user experience, but few will probably have the patience to.

For an additional look at these four applications please take a few minutes to watch my video walk through:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Did this review help? Which app will you use?

Don’t shoot me. I know you and everyone else on this planet is sick of hearing about Twitter every time they turn on the TV or the computer. Twitter is so over-saturated and exposed that it is hard not to be completely fed up with the frenzy. However, with this frenzy has come a lot of new interest in Twitter and I have received many questions asking: “Why is Twitter so great?” “What makes it better than my blog or Facebook?” “Why do I need yet another service?”

Twitter isn’t better than any other service nor can it make miracles happen, but it has a killer component that goes under discussed and remains the primary reason everyone is plugging their twitter username. Twitter is public word of mouth. Read that last sentence again.

Individuals and marketers have always sought out the promotion holy grail that is word-of-mouth marketing.  It does have its limits though. In the pre-digital age word-of-mouth was limited to public conversations and then facilitated on a larger scale by media outlets. As we got digital this all changed. E-mail forwarding become a very popular word-of-mouth method that users adopted from e-mail.

The problem with e-mail and even social networks is that the conversations that happen there are private. Limited to the people who get or are passed a long the e-mail. Or in the case of something like Facebook limited to who you are friends with.  Twitter changed this.

Twitter is limited by nothing, because all conversations are public (unless you choose to make a profile private). A conversation I have with my friend Wayne on Twitter is a free-for-all. It can be “heard” by people following each of us, people looking at the public time line, people using twitter search, people using Google or someone using one of the 2,000 applications built on the Twitter API. This openness makes makes for a full-on word-of-mouth sprint where everyone’s data is competing for attention.

This is why P Diddy wants to be on Twitter, not just for the 300,000+ people that follow him, but for the millions he reaches because of Twitter’s publicly sprawling data.

Some corporations get it and others don’t. While at SXSW Interactive this past week Chris Brogan organized a flash panel with social media leads from some of America’s most well-known corporations including Pepsi, JetBlue, Crocs, AMD, Best Buy, and General Motors. I was able to record the entire panel (note: it is shaky in the beginning but then I switch to a tripod) and I recommend watching the video as these companies had strong insights about using social media and integrating it into large corporations.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The theme they all talked about is humanizing the brand. To humanize a brand in today’s two-way communication world, you have to personalize your brand.  When personalizing a brand their are three important steps: listening, engaging and creating value. How does your company do these three things? How could they do it better?

What was you favorite nugget of information from the panel?

Big thanks to Chris and all of the panel speakers for putting on this event.

Today the interwebs are buzzing with the latest announcments from Facebook.  With today’s announcements Facebook is taking direct aim at Twitter. It has been reported, that last year Facebook tried to by Twitter for $500 million and Twitter declined. Twitter is really hot right now and many celebrities and businesses are using Twitter to reach their fans. With these two groups goes a lot of money and potential for being profitable. That is why today Facebook rolled out changes to its service to make it more real-time, like twitter and removing friend caps and private pages to make it more celebrity friendly.

With these changes by Facebook I have seen TONS of people commenting and tweeting that this is the end of Twitter and these changes will hurt Twitter badly. No they won’t.

Here are 6 reasons why:

1. Facebook and Twitter are completely different types of networks. Facebook is a network where you know the people personally and care about connecting with them. Twitter is a network in which you don’t know the people but instead care what they have to say and get to know them through the information they share.
2. Twitter is simple, Facebook is not so simple. It is not that Facebook is hard to use, because it is not, but compared to Twitter’s 140 characters; Facebook’s status updates, picture and video uploads, profile pages and the rest are much more complicated. Complicated isn’t bad, but it again means regardless of its changes Facebook can never be Twitter.
3. Information is accessed and delivered differently.  Facebook is a web portable with mobile web applications that keep all of its many features intact, that is if you have a phone with a web browser. Facebook can alert you via e-mail when certain actions happen, but otherwise you need to be sign in to the desktop or mobile version to use the service.  Twitter instead can be accessed through web, desktop apps, SMS and third-party applications.   More importantly Twitter can deliver updates, replies and direct messages through SMS making it open to anyone with a cell phone and making it a much more mobile network.
4. Twitter is Public, Facebook is Private. Facebook has always been a walled garden meaning that you had to be signed in to Facebook to see any part of Facebook. With Twitter profiles and messages are public unless your request that they be public. This means that in terms of data, search engine indexing and other open applications Twitter has a major advantage.
5. Twitter has Twitter Search. Looking back on Twitter’s first few years as a company, one of the smartest things they did was to purchase Summize and make it Twitter Search allowing for real-time searching of information on Twitter. This has lead to endless possibilities for monitoring trends, events, and everything else. This information is very valuable and will be at the core of how Twitter will make money. Facebook can’t and does not have this.
6. Twitter’s API beats Facebook’s applications. This final point gets back to the idea of the walled garden idea of Facebook. Twitter has a rich API that has lead to the development of thousands of applications that use Twitter. Many people use Twitter without ever going to the web interface. Instead to access Facebook applications you must be signed into Facebook. This type of closed approach to development limits the way people can use the applications and how the application developers can make money.

Facebook is a giant force in the social networking space and with 175 million users and counting will not have any problems with long-term growth and success. My point is that regardless of the changes Facebook makes, it won’t be Twitter. Twitter will have its own opportunities for growth and the two services should have no problem coexisting.

These changes aren’t the death of Twitter, rather they validate the power of Twitter.

Twitter is hot right now, I mean it is freakin on fire. I can’t turn on the TV without a TV news person asking me to tweet them.  Needless to say all of this new found Twitter love makes me happy that I started being a part of the Twitter community nearly two years ago.

With all of this news coverage also comes new users. Where users go companies follow. Companies from all industries in and outside or technology have been joining Twitter in the past year. The problem with running a corporate twitter account is that often multiple people contribute to only one account, which can make it hard to know if anyone has responded to the accounts replies or direct messages. Enter CoTweet, a new web service launched last week with the goal of making it easy for companies to manage their Twitter accounts.

For the full run down on CoTweet please watch my brief video review:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Yesterday we held our second meeting of Social Media Breakfast Raleigh. We had a great turnout and I would like to thank everyone who came out to participate. As part of the event I asked Jeff Cohen to speak for a few minutes talking about how the volunteers of Raleigh Twestival used Twitter to market the event, which raised money for Charity Water.  Jeff went a step farther and created this blog post to outline the 11 steps people should take when promoting an event on Twitter.  I recommend you check out his blog post. It is good stuff. I also did a quick video of part of his talk which I have included in this post.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For folks getting started with Twitter and are trying to understand its applications this is a prime example of one of them.

Twitter is growing so fast now, that I thought I would make this fun list for all of us old school twitter users.

You have have been tweeting so long that…

1. You remember when Twhirl and Tweetdeck didn’t exist
2. You are still surprised that Twitter doesn’t crash and you kinda miss seeing the Fail Whale
3. You remember the “Track” feature
4. You remember when IM posting worked
5. You remember that their was no search feature, then you remember using Terraminds search, then finally Sumize
6. You remember how well Sumize worked before Twitter bought it.
7. You remember when virtually no companies were on Twitter
8. You remember when Chris Brogan use to tweet his phone number for “Calls Chris” what seemed like everyday.
9. You remember when no one had custom backgrounds
10. You remember a time when Twitter was free of spam and auto direct messages
11. You remember that their wasn’t even a reply button on the web interface
12. You remember when all of the people who are joining twitter right now said it was stupid a year or two ago

OK so what did I forget? Please add yours in the comments and then I will update the blog post! Big thanks tweeps.

Sometimes a quick exchange on Twitter can be more powerful than a incredibly in depth blog post. Today was one of the times. I had an interesting exchange with Beth Harte and Ike Pigott about personal branding which is always a highly controversial topic.

The exchange centered around the fact that personal branding shouldn’t be the main goal when individuals participate online. In reality personal branding is just a secondary function from building your credibility online and off line.

The Conversation:

Here is my tweet:
kbodnar32: @ikepigott @BethHarte personal branding speaks to being credible. So being credible should be the goal and personal brand the side benefit

BethHarte: @ikepigott I'd agree with that…it's about reputation (being credible) that is. But my personal brand doesn't have a logo, etc.

about 4 minutes ago

Mon Feb 16 16:03:42 +0000 2009

ikepigott: – Bingo. Building a Personal Brand around being a Brandable Person is circular, egotistical, and empty.

about 9 minutes ago

Mon Feb 16 15:59:10 +0000 2009

1918: well said!

about 9 minutes ago

Mon Feb 16 15:58:53 +0000 2009