140Char

Much like the constant updates of Twitter itself, picking what to write about after a break enforced by work/family is tricky as a huge amount of microblogging and Twitter coverage flows through my RSS feeds on a daily basis – so expect plenty of catching up shortly.

The admirable Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) reminded me this morning that there’s only a week left for open contributions to Twitter for Dummies.

The good thing is that you don’t need to write everything up:

‘Want to see your tip, idea or case study in Twitter for Dummies? Submit it today and get your friends to vote it up. We can’t include everything, but we’ll mention as many of the best ones as we can.

We’ll keep taking ideas for one more week — until Wednesday, April 8, 2009. We can’t guarantee your story will make it into the final edition. We CAN guarantee that the most popular charity submitted and voted up will get 10% of the royalties from book sales.’

So as long as you interact by Wednesday, you’ll get to share some knowledge, possibly be listed in a Dummies guide, and raise some money for charity.

It may because I’m tired and a bit ill, and the fact I’m following an ever-increasing number of Twitter-related blogs, but it seems that there is a never ending stream of guides to starting on Twitter, or gaining followers, and 90% of them have the exact same advice. (Even the New York Times carries a Twitter beginners guide!)

For the record, I didn’t feel the need to do one after I read Luke Razzell’s excellent Twitter guide back in October. Search traffic be damned!

Whether you’re an individual or brand, the tips are always to be human, interactive, interesting etc.  Which is basically the same as you’d get for any network, or for your offline life.

So I’d like to suggest that following most of these guides is a complete waste of time – if you’re a spammer by nature, or your company is in fact the work of evil robotic overlords, then you’ll revert to your true nature eventually, and you’ll have wasted everyone’s time until the mask falls.

Instead, I’ll present the one suggestion I think should be given out to everyone as the way I’d love to see people using Twitter.

Rule 1: Try to make other people’s lives suck a little bit less.

That’s it.

There’s no ‘how to’ guide because it varies for every individual. It could be providing great customer service (Do I need to reference @ComcastCares or @Zappos?). It could be by responding to someone asking for messages to demo Twitter to their colleagues, or finding a bookmark someone has lost.

Or it could even be auto-posting from your blog via Twitterfeed if that’s how people want to receive information (despite all right-thinking wisdom pointing to the contrary!)

It could be something more formal, like helping out with a great charity project like the Charity Water campaign by @Pistachio, or contributing to a personal attempt to help a family.

It could be posting something that makes someone think, laugh, cry or start a conversation.

It’s simple, but easy to overlook when you’re thinking about other things.

‘We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give‘ Sir Winston Churchill.