I recently rejoined Twitter after many months away from my initial infatuation with it. As I’ve been in it heavily now for a month and have observed a culture unto itself but haven’t found anything that talks about proper Twitter etiquette. With something this new there are always a lot of opinions but there seems to be some consensus around the following areas:

• Ad value to the conversation. Don’t just plug yourself, your blog, your product, etc. all the time. Twittequette: The occasional plug seems to be accepted but there should be a balance between other tweets and the purely promotional tweets. I credit Mitch Joel for pushing this idea.
• It’s okay to be random. Consistence on a regular topic from any one person doesn’t seem to be expected. A person you follow may link to an interesting story with one tweet and then talk about a movie he just watched with the next tweet followed by a really helpful observation or question in the third tweet. Twittequette: The randomness and even the mundane can sometimes be the most interesting.
• Don’t have too many more people following you than you’re following. There is a sense that it’s bad form to have significantly more followers than those you are following. Twittequette: If you’re not following the people who have chosen to follow you you’re not part of the conversation. You’re just a diva giving a lecture (albeit a lecture with 140 characters or less.) I credit Jeremiah Owyang for this idea.
• Don’t carry on lengthy conversations. If you follow two people who are also connected to each other they can send messages between them. You’ll see both sides of the conversation. That’s interesting to a degree but the downside is that they can also dominate you Twitter stream with a lengthy conversation. Twittequette: If you know it’s going to be more than a single question and response conversation it’s better to jump over to email, instant message, phone, or some other non-Twitter means of communication.

I’m sure there are more items for proper Twittequette. If you have one (or more) to add I’d love to see them in the comments.

Several months ago I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon with a slew of other people. I thought it was a pretty cool micro blogging platform, but to be honest, I really just checked it out because I saw a lot of other people doing it. After a week or two I kind of lost interest but over the last few weeks I’ve found myself going back to it. Here are a few reasons why:

• It’s a great way to promote your blog to people who have willingly shown an interest in you. The thing about Twitter is that people who are “following” you will see every time you post so they have elected to receive your updates. What else can you ask for than notifying people about a blog post when they’ve already shown an interest. I think that’s what Seth Godin calls permission marketing.
• There’s a Twitter application for Facebook. I like Facebook. I like Twitter. Combining the two is doubly good.
• I like to keep up with people informally and I’m happy to let people keep up with me the same way. From a micro blogging standpoint, there are a lot of people who I’d be interested to know what their doing and for the ones using Twitter, I like to see what they’re into.

If you’re on Twitter, let me know. You can find me on there under the highly creative moniker billseaver.

I had the chance to do the web 2.0 overview presentation to a group of marketing professionals today consisting mostly of graphic designers and copywriters (and I also said I’d give a shout out to Ben H. who asked if I would be blogging about the presentation).

The presentation always covers the good old “massive Volkswagon” (MASSVW) that I’ve written about previously. A recent addition to the presentation was a discussion on the shift in the marketing messaging due to web 2.0. Specifically, it breaks down into two areas: tone and brevity.

Tone: The shift in copy tone is informal, conversational and fun. Compare the following, two email marketing companies tell the public about themselves in very different ways. The first takes the traditional approach and the second takes the new approach:

About Lyris:
Lyris Technologies, a subsidiary of J.L. Halsey Corporation, is a pioneer in the email technology industry. Since 1994, the company has been at the forefront of developing world-class email marketing software and services, while maintaining a record of strong profitability and compound annual growth.

As the choice of more than 5,000 major corporations and growing businesses Lyris’ flagship product, Lyris ListManager, is one of the world’s best-selling software solutions for email marketing and deliverability, while Lyris ListHosting offers the same powerful capabilities in a convenient, on-demand web-based solution.

About Emma:
In late 2001, Will Weaver and Clint Smith (known in more familiar circles as Will and Clint, or the Tall One and the Not-So-Tall One), began researching the email marketing and communications field. The two had recently started a company they named Cold Feet Creative, and their intent was to apply their sense of style and interface design to a niche market where, against other, more complicated software applications, they might stand out. Email Marketing, with its TargetBlasters and Contact2000s and MailBaboons and MailBaboonTargetBlasters, would do nicely.

So they built a prototype and called it Emma. They liked the name “Emma” because it formed a nice and handy abbreviation of the phrase email marketing and because it brought with it an inherent human quality. It’s a real name - like Antoinette or Frederick, only shorter. And that was what these two gentlemen were after - a way to bring software to life, but not literally because the software might decide to begin lopping people’s heads off, or running out for sandwiches at extremely inopportune times.

Brevity: With many of the web 2.0 technologies, the opportunities to be verbose are simply not available many times because the technology won’t allow it. For instance, a Google Adword doesn’t allow more the 25 or 35 characters on a line. Many text messages don’t receive more than 160 characters and the popular micro messaging system Twitter doesn’t allow more than 140 characters per message. Word counts don’t apply in this new micro messaging shift, rather character counts (which includes each letter, number, space, and punctuation mark) are the new constraints on a message.

Last week I talked about the launch of a new project I’m part of called MySliceofPi.com. One of the things we saw quickly was that the very people we think will use MySlice weren’t interested because the price was out of their range. Today we dropped the bottom out of the prices so it’s accessible to many more people. The new prices are simply the value of the number, meaning a five is now $5 rather than $50. Whereas the cheapest number to buy was $10 in the previous version, the most expensive one is $9 under the new price structure. We saw an immediate jump in slices after that change today so that was all the affirmation we needed.

In case you’re wondering, we did automatically refund the difference in price to anyone who purchased under the old pricing model. Also, for those of you who may be using Twitter, I think MySlice could serve as a shorthand reference (since you only get 140 characters per post) for you if you want to quickly reference something you can say “Pi” and the people would learn that you’ve got something for them to see on your digit. So instead of Twittering, “check out my tumble log” and providing a link I could just say, “Pi5″ which is translated “go to mysliceofPi digit 5 to see my message and link.”

As new media is expanding rapidly and pushing for bigger and better content there’s an interesting thing happening…a few new services are focused on micro messages.

Twitter, for instance, is a text only log in which you have 140 characters available per “post” and you can submit them through the Twitter interface, your instant message service, or text message. You can check out my Twitter page to see what I mean.

At the same time, a new mini blog tool has emerged called Tumblr. Tumblr is essentially stripped down blog service. There’s no comments available and the tone lends itself to stream of consciousness more than anything else. It does allow images, embedded video, and a long post (if you would want to do that here) unlike Twitter. See mine here.

After playing around with both of these for a while tonight I think there’s something really compelling here. My first thought was that these services will be niche successes…meaning they’re not the kinds of things a non blogger or those uninitiated into the world of social networking will likely dive into. Then I realized this “niche” grew by at least 35 million blogs and well over 100 million social network registrants last year…so if I’m Twitter or Tumblr, that’s a nice fat niche to tap into. Whatever the case both of these are a perfect outlet for someone who feels like they’re somewhere beyond the white belt at the web 2.0 dojo. They play together nicely too. Tumblr will pull in your Twitter RSS feed for the perfect melding of the two.

I’m personally excited about this because I’ve felt like I needed an outlet for things that don’t really fit the general topic of this blog. Also, the very nature of both of these means I can’t really spend much time on it so it forces me to say what I want and move on with the day. I’m looking forward to twitting and tumbling.