I recently attended the Blogalicious Weekend in Atlanta which was the first blogging conference for women of color. And as with any major conference in the last few years, Twitter is all the rage as the tool of choice to document an event and send and receive short messages from attendees.

It occurred to me while at a conference where the tech savvy ranged from expert to total newbie that those of us who use Twitter regularly take for granted that it is there and ready for us to use. Anyone who hasn’t yet tried Twitter often can’t get past the “what the heck is it?” question as well as “how in the world would I use it?”

So I wanted to compile a list of 10 tips for starting to use Twitter for your business and your life because Twitter is flexible that way. But until you can understand - and communicate - the benefits and best practices, it is hard to convince anyone (including yourself) that Twitter has any value at all.

On with the tips.

1. Get a smart Twitter handle. When it comes to business, the best Twitter handle you can get is your own name or maybe even your company name. But whatever name you choose, make sure you have a strategic reason for using it. How do you want to be recognized and remembered in business circles? If you’re thinking you’ll only use Twitter for personal reasons, think again. The lines continue to blur between anything you do in social networks professionally and personally so choose your Twitter handle with care.

2. Choose a clear icon. Most people use a photo of themselves as their Twitter icon or avatar and that’s great because people want to interact with people. However, there it is also acceptable to use your company logo as your Twitter icon if you are speaking “as the brand” instead of more personally as yourself. In many small businesses, you the business owner are the brand. Choosing the right image to use is important to make a good first impression and to build a recognizable Twitter presence.

3. Brand your page. You have the ability to change the background on your Twitter page. Take advantage of that otherwise blank space to better brand your page with your logo, relevant photos, and even additional text and links. While the background image is not “clickable,” just spelling out your web site URL or including graphics to show you are also on Facebook can give your followers more information than the 160 character bio and single link Twitter offers you.

4. Follow selectively. While it may be tempting to follow as many people as you can in hopes that they follow you back, you should really have strategic reasons for following other people. Some good business reasons to follow someone include: they are a luminary in your industry; they act as a human filter and post links to relevant articles often; you do business with them; or they are someone you’d like to network with such as a member of the media. Follow a few people at a time, then listen and engage them in dialogue or retweet them. Then add a few more. Keep your following to follower ratio in balance, that is, you want to make sure you have more followers than the number of people you are following. Otherwise, you look like a Twitter spammer or at the very least, desperate.

5. Listen before you tweet. Like with any community, listen first by following along the conversations you see in your Twitterstream based on who you are following. Don’t pipe up until you know you have something of value to share. Value can range from a link to an interesting and relevant article to a useful tip to someone who is asking for advice to a retweet of someone’s great quote or giving kudos to someone you follow on Twitter for something they’ve done.

6. Pick your tool. There are many desktop-based, Web-based and mobile-device based applications to post to Twitter. Pick the mode that is most comfortable for you and the tool that makes the most sense to you. For desktop, many people love TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop. For the Web, I still use my Twitter home page but also use Splitweet to post to different Twitter accounts. For my iPhone, I love Tweetie but have also tried Twittelator and TweetDeck. And there’s Twitterberry for the Blackberry among others. Most of these tools are free or cheap so don’t be afraid to try out a few until you find the right one.

7. Pay attention to what matters. It is easy to get swept up into the Twitterstream and get off topic. Keep your goals in mind when you are using Twitter. Are you ultimately trying to sell product? Don’t get so caught up in the tweet flurry that you forget to occasionally tweet links to your products. Are you looking for clients? Use Twitter to network and then be careful how else you Tweet because people are watching including potential clients.

8. Tweet regularly. While you can blog once a week at the very minimum and still keep some momentum going with your blog, Twitter is a much more immediate and constant stream of interaction. Expect to tweet at least daily, but you’ll be much more effective if you tweet several times a day. Don’t plan out every single tweet - spontaneity is a good thing on Twitter.

9. Reference and retweet. Be generous on Twitter and you will be rewarded. While it may be tempting to use Twitter to broadcast about yourself and your company all the time, you should balance self-referencial tweets with those that give kudos to others. Retweets are always appreciated by others - just make sure they are on message for your own followers.

10. Step away. It is easy to get sucked into Twitter for hours, but it really only takes 15 minutes a day to do good things on Twitter. Spend more time only if you have strategic business reasons to do so, otherwise, you can find yourself wasting time instead.

Overall, be yourself, be real, be engaged in your tweet community. The value of Twitter comes from the value you put into it.

What are some tips you’ve learned as you’ve incorporated Twitter into your communications tool kit?

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Obligatory disclaimer: I have been given an Epson WorkForce 600 all-in-one device to review but also to keep. If you know me at all, you will know that this in no way compromises the following review.

One thing I know about myself, and I will be the first to admit it: I cannot follow instructions. I even struggle to follow recipes when cookie and inevitably mess the entire dish up because I misread something. So I tend to use recipes as vague guidelines to creating my own dishes. But technical instructions for tech devices? My eyes just glaze over, and I just take a deep breath and try to figure out each device by intuition.

That said, when the Epson WorkForce 600 arrived, I knew that it would never be as simple as plugging it into the wall and into my MacBook.

So truth be told, I turned to my husband to help me set things up even though I’m considered to be far more “techy” than he. My husband compensates for his Luddite tendencies by reading instructions cover to cover, often highlighting important passages. He follows instructions step-by-step, page-by-page. His meticulousness with direction following is a marvel to behold. While he set up my new printer, I sat back and sipped my coffee, careful not to be a backseat driver during the process. My major contribution was handing him some printer paper. I participated.

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I’ve worked in many rural areas including Lander, Wyoming (Pop: 7800) where if the wind blew just a little too hard, my Internet connection went down - and you know how the wind blows in Wyoming! I’ve even worked from an old RV on the road, in state parks and at other campgrounds. And soon, I’ll be working from my new home in Tok, Alaska (Pop: 1800) along the Alaska Highway.

Here are some of my tips for working from remote and rural areas. I also turned to a Twitterfriend, Becky McCray, who provides some additional tips. I’ll introduce her after the jump.

Doing Business in Rural Places

1. Invest in fast Internet access. Sometimes it has to be satellite which can be pricey, but you can write it off your taxes as a valid and essential business expense.

2. Identify wifi hotspots - or Internet-enabled locations - in your area. If my Internet connection went down, I’d drive into town to connect at a cafe or restaurant or even a hotel or campground. Some McDonalds and Wendys even offer wifi so find out which businesses are wired and use them as backup when your access goes down.

3. Stock up on car chargers. Even when house power went out - particularly in my RV - I could rev up the engine and power up my essential tools and gadgets including computer and mobile devices. Invest in a USB car charger to charge your handhelds such as the SynCh from Malleable Devices.*

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I’ve been making more and more presentations about social media and because it is all still so new to everyone - including the “experts” - I’m refining my spiel as I go along. Here are some topics that are trending as some of the most important points I try to make about social media along with what I hope are concise, clear explanations about the technical stuff.

1. A Blog is Your Social Media Hub
When I say this, many people gasp, especially those who finally got a web site up after all these years or just spent a bucketload of money to redesign their existing web site. I’m not saying that a web site is now obsolete because of social media and Web 2.0 tools, however, blog publishing tools tend to integrate these tools so that embedding social functionality is incredibly easy. Many web sites and custom or older web site content management systems don’t even support javascript code, literally stripping out widgets and embedded social features. Blogs, by the nature of comments, encourage social interaction from the get go. Web sites struggle to be interactive and these days are turned to by consumers more for evergreen or background information or an online store, not the most current news or conversation.
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I haven’t participated in a lot of conference calls, mostly because I do a lot of my communications via email. Also, more recently, I use Skype to make free long distance calls and for conferencing people from California to Australia. But lately, I have been checking out a number of free conference call applications  on the Web (that do require calling a TOLL number) and thinking about how they might help me in my business. Those apps include FreeConference.com, Rondee, and I’m also going to check out Palbee and DimDim.

In the last few weeks, I’ve actually been putting one of the applications - Calliflower - to use. I’ve been corresponding with several other women and doing some brainstorming and mutual pep talks as each of us try to take our careers and businesses to the next level. We have a lot of ideas for ways we can help one another as well as work together.

Email was just not sufficient for our “talks.” So we’ve set up a regular weekly conference call with the four of us. And if one of us can’t make it? Calliflower lets us record the call and save it as an MP3 file that we can access later if we missed the call.

How else can you take advantage of the free conferencing apps out there? Let me count the ways…

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I’m all for anything that makes my life and work easier, and I still believe - after over 20 years online - that Internet access to information and applications truly provides convenience to help cut down on all that busy work, wasted time and superfluous spending.

Here are some online services that can help you perform business tasks more cheaply, more easily, or both.

Stamps.com - I did a review of Stamps.com on the CBS Morning Show in the 90s, and their service is still solid today. The Web-based service let’s you calculate and print postage directly from your computer and printer. Since they work in conjunctino with the Unites States Postal Service, the postage labels you print are official. For small businesses that need to track their expenditures, Stamps.com offers a detailed record down to client codes.
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A few weeks ago, I heard the phrase “working in the clouds” for the first time. The phrase refers to the way many people are starting to use online-based applications for their work processes and tasks rather than computer-based solutions. Even without thinking very much about it, I’ve been “working in the clouds” more and more often in the last six months. But after my big computer crash and near-loss of all 10-months worth of data, I’ve been thinking a lot more about “cloud computing” ever since.

There are definitely major pros but also major cons to cloud computing, and weighing them out is often too much for my overloaded brain to handle. But I thought I’d share my thoughts on the topic and then hear from you as well so we can share best practices on this revolutionary way of work.

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A client of mine teased me the other day when she saw me pull out my calendar book to write down an entry.

“I thought you were so tech, and here you are with a paper calendar,” she said by way of explanation.

“But I have a 30Boxes calendar as well!” I retorted. “And it sends me text message reminders to my cellphone!”

I don’t know why I felt that I needed to prove my tech savvy by rattling off how wired I really am and that the paper calendar is just my first line of defense against my progressively bad memory.

I just like the tangible feeling of a paper calendar. I like the feeling of pen on paper. I like seeing what I write on a page. Our words are so digitized these days with reading and writing emails, reading our news on Web sites, connecting with others through online social networks - that for me, writing things down on paper really grounds me.

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I’m on the road for two weeks with family - not a business trip but not totally a vacation - and am having a tough time getting into a groove so I can actually get some work done - including blogging here. The time zones are mixing me up, I’m forgetting what day it is, I’m having a heck of a time finding a consistent Internet connection, and all my organizational tactics seem useless when I’m not sitting at my home office.

Because I’ll be traveling for another week and a half, I’m trying to find solutions to my work-from-the-road challenge. If I were traveling on business, I’d have everything I needed to stay organized including a constant wifi connection because any hotel that hosts conferences is wired and a set schedule of meetings or events that I could use to know what day it is and estimate time to keep track of when I can do my own work.
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Last year, I blogged about my foray into Second Life from a business standpoint. To bring you up to speed, here are my latest endeavors and how my previous ventures have morphed over time.

My Evolving Work

Last year, I was working on several things in Second Life for income (in the Second Life currency Linden which can be converted into dollars - about L$268 per $1 US). My work included:

1. Business reporter for SLNN.com
2. Virtual tshirt shop
3. Custom tshirt business
4. Real world tshirt shop through CafePress.
5. Writer-in-Residence on Elysian Isle

Today, my work is different. I still occasionally report for SLNN.com on real world companies and organizations coming into Second Life and have added SLEntrepreneur magazine to my writing roster where I publish a twice-monthly column about women business owners in Second Life. But writing is taking more of a backburner because it consumes a lot of time for little pay.
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