Twitip

As a medical, health, wellness or fitness professional, you may have been lured into using social media tools such as twitter to promote your brand, promote your message or increase your profile.

The fact is, that there are numerous fads promoted on the internet and we will never be able to stop this. What we can do however, is to work as a team to promote positive health messages that are backed up with good science. The more voices from qualified and experienced practitioners the better.

If you’re just getting started, here are 7 tips that can help you be more effective.

1. Confidentiality: Confidentiality is equally important online as it is offline. It is not ok to mention any information that can identify clients or patients in social media. It is also important not to write anything where a patient could identify themselves – it could be embarrassing for them or break client trust so important in in achieving positive health outcomes. (more…)

Over the past few weeks, the Twitterverse has been rocked by events that might have as much an impact on the Twitter ecosystem as asteroids did on dinosaurs. For better or worse, when the history of Twitter is written, these events will be remembered for either the birth of Twitter 2.0 or the beginning of the end.

Just over a year ago, I wrote Twipocalypse Now: Warnings of a Twitter Bubble and Twitter Fatigue: Rumors of Twitter’s Demise May Not Be Greatly Exaggerated for Twitip. In those posts, I suggested that Twitter and their third-party developers faced significant threats that would need to be addressed in order for Twitter and its ecosystem to not just survive, but to continue to flourish.

I had originally planned on revisiting those topics 6 months later to see how accurate my predictions were. However, Twitter’s rapid growth and evolution suggested something dramatic was on the horizon, so I decided to wait and see what would happen. (more…)

With Twitter’s much-anticipated advertising platform underway, it’ll be interesting to see where this takes their user base and their financial standing. This brings Twitter another step closer to becoming know as a major, real-time search engine. With that said, here is a look at Twitter’s value from its inception.

On Wednesday at Chirp, Twitter’s developer conference, Apigee launched new developer tools for the Twitter API.

Developers and beginners can use the Apigee console to learn, experiment, test, or explore the Twitter API.

As you can see, each API method is listed down the left hand side. You can use these methods to explore different aspects and functions of the Twitter API. Choose the method you want to use, customize any parameter values, such as screen_name and ID, and hit the Test button. The Apigee console will then issue an API call and you’ll then see a cleanly-formatted response as well as the original request and response headers for the call. What does this mean for the developer? Well, it gives them unprecedented ease of use.

For API methods that require authentication, you can use HTTP basic authentication (a straight username and password). Better still, you can even sign in to Twitter and use that same authentication to sign API calls using OAuth (the system under “sign in with Twitter”). This is incredibly helpful for developers using the Twitter API because no other free tools support OAuth for Twitter methods.

But, possibly the best feature of all is the Snapshot. With Snapshot, any request and response you make with the API Console can be cached and shared with anyone else without your credentials. This is really helpful because it means that when you are trying to get help from someone else for a particular API response, you can just share your Snapshot of the call with them. Fabulous!

Start playing (for free) with the Apigee Console for Twitter!

As many of you recently heard Twitter has just released it’s own client application for Blackberry platform and only days later – acquired Tweetie, one of the popular iPhone Twitter apps. What could it mean for an average Twitter user? (more…)

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Just curious – I’m wondering how many of you still find Twitter to be as interesting and awesome as you used to find it.

For newer Twits, it may very well be. For those of us who were “early adopters”, we’ve got clearly different experiences. I remember Twitter before every television show and celebrity and news station had a Twitter account. Before every business went to crazy lengths to get followers. And before it became a place over-run with teenagers Tweeting about crazy sexual stuff. I remember when it was truly a networking place between colleagues, old and new. It was fun to go and see what some of the people I look up to in my field were reading or writing or talking about.

My personal feeling? There’s lots of clutter in Twitter these days. People who follow you in hopes of you following them back so they can increase their follower count, only to unfollow you if you don’t reciprocate, or once they’ve got you following them.

What do you think? Vote, and then discuss your answer in the comments!

A quick Twitter Tool announcement – Let us know if you use it, and what you think!

Ever get tired of having to pick a winner for a Twitter contest that you just hosted? Well now there’s a tool that does it for you! twitRand is a very simple twitter tool that picks random Twitter users out of specifics that you provide. If you had your contestants tweet a phrase, hashtag or just had a contest that included all your followers, just enter the phrase into the twitRand search box and let it do the work.

This can be really helpful if many of your contestants get that “sore loser” mentality because they lost, now you can prove to them with twitRand that everything was fair and square. twitRand even gives you a link that outlines the exact time, date and the winner of the contest.

So if your ever in need of some help in choosing a contest winner besides the old shut your eyes and hope you land on your screen tactic, check out twitRand!

I’m sure you’ve already asked yourself this question: “What can I do with the hundreds, even thousands, of links to sites, videos, photos, my followed tweeps are sharing every day?” Too much content here, requiring too much time to go through… But, obviously, this content may be of interest. You are following these tweeps for good reasons, aren’t you?

So the big question is how could one easily browse this immense list and quickly discover, among this massive flow of data shared by my followed people, the articles, blogs, sites, videos, I want to spend time on? This is exactly what the new (free) tool Paper.li is about. (more…)

Twitter Favorites is like that barking dog. You aren’t sure how to deal with it, and keep looking for some obedience classes to tame ‘the beast’.

I “favorite” several quality Tweets that I see come through my Twitter stream. Especially when I am out traveling I do this a lot.

Often I see a Tweet that I want to dig deeper into, but just don’t have the time to give it the proper attention right away.

Twitter allows you to Favorite Tweets that come through your Twitter stream. This is all fine and dandy, the only problem with Twitter Favorites is that the only option Twitter provide is to store Favorites sequential by default.

Google Reader To The Rescue

Since Twitter or 3rd party products don’t offer options at the moment to organize your Twitter Favorites we need to be a little creative. (more…)

This is a screenshot of Twitter. No gimmicks, no PhotoShop. (Click to enlarge.)

I’ll show you a simple way to turn your experience on Twitter.com into one very similar to most Twitter web applications out there, such as Tweetdeck, Seesmic or Hootsuite. (more…)