One of the joys many people, including myself, find with Twitter is the beauty of the tweeted “overheard” statement, which is some odd statement that is, well, overheard, that you just feel compelled to share with the rest of the world. (Because of character constraints, “OH:” is usually used before the statement instead of “Overheard” though I confess when I first saw people using this I wondered what Ohio had to do with anything.)

Usually neither attribution nor context is given, which makes them that much funnier. In fact, in my office, it’s become somewhat of a competition between coworkers to see who makes my “overheard” tweets. I work with a very creative, linguistic bunch and there’s never a dull moment in our conversations. My overheard tweets aren’t always coworkers, mind you, oftentimes they’re friends outside the office, like at gigs or something.

Anyway, the other day I decided to see which gems I had tweeted “OH:” recently, so  I went to my profile and searched “OH:” in my tweets only. Twitter only archives the past few days now, which I just learned, but the tweets in my past few days’ archives were not only hilarious, but kind of sounded like a funny story if you read them in chronological order.

Keep in mind that NONE of these tweets are related in any way, shape or form, and most had completely different contexts:

To “get it,” you have to read from the bottom up, but to make it easier, here they are in succession:

“That’s like, WAAAAAY down the road. Like Friday.”

“Haven’t you seen Subway commercials? Don’t you know the right way to say it?”

“I wore so much black I out-blacked myself. Black is the new black!”

“You are the reason that dress was invented.”

“Woo! It’s nice and bright in here! It makes me wanna take this dress off!” #unrelatedtothelasttweet

“We’re going to drool all over her like a pork chop.”

“… and it doesn’t give you the risk of having quintuplets!”

“You just want me for my numbers.”

“You gotta perpetuate the SEO-ness of your lineage.”

“Who the hell are you and why are you soliciting me?!”

OK, maybe it’s only funny to me, but I’m curious to see if anybody else’s completely unrelated overheard tweets also look like they kinda tell a story. It’s an interesting and fun exercise.

Here’s what you do:

1. Just view your own profile on Twitter.
2. Plug “OH:” (or “overheard,” whichever you use) into the search box and make sure that the box is checked to read only your own tweets.
3. Read from the bottom up.
4. Do they kinda tell a story?
5. If so, take a screen shot & share.

Come on, you know you want to. It’s fun!

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1. Geeks have more fun!

There’s nothing like tweeting about blogging and blogging about tweeting to beat a dead horse into the ground, eh?

Guess what?

I’m doing it anyway.

Last week a friend messaged me on BlackBerry messenger about something, I don’t remember the exact context, but somewhere along the line I decided to send him a link in a direct message (DM) via Twitter, and realized he wasn’t following me. So I asked him why, and he said he was “trying a different approach to his Twitter strategy” and he unfollowed a lot of people in order to reduce the noise in his stream. His logic was that if he wanted to talk to me, see what was up with me lately, etc., we’re connected on Facebook and of course, BlackBerry messenger.

I can respect that.

However, it spurned an interesting conversation about “Twitter strategies.” People put a lot of time and effort into trying to figure out how to best use this tiny tool of epic proportions. Ari Herzog has been experimenting with it and documenting his findings, which, from an analytical perspective, is very interesting.

People ask me what my Twitter strategy is quite a bit. To my knowledge, I’ve never really divulged the details of what it is in writing, until now.

Are you ready? After the jump, you’ll find out my own personal Twitter strategy. (If you came here on a direct link, you won’t see the “Read more” thing.)

I don’t have one.

You read that right — I don’t have a Twitter strategy. I think putting that much time and thought into a fun little tool is silly. Note that I am talking about for personal use and not necessarily if you maintain a Twitter account for a business or organization. Even still, there’s only one rule I abide by:

Be yourself.

That’s it.

I have no agenda, I just tweet random stuff that comes out of my brain. I share things I find interesting, whether they’re blog posts, pictures, or LOLcats. Yes, I auto-populate stuff to Twitter, like my FourSquare check-ins and YouTube favorites, and even on the rare occasion that I do update this blog, but overall? I’m just me. I’ll share with you random thoughts, rants things that bug me, I like to point out absurdities and quote things that I overhear. I just find it fun, and have had some great conversations using Twitter and through it have met some incredible people, both online and off. I ReTweet stuff other people have shared if I like it.

How do I decide who/what to follow?

I have a special folder in one of my inboxes that filters all email from Twitter.com into it, so that’s where my new follower notifications go. When I have time, I go through each one, click the person’s name, go to their profile, and take less than three seconds to decide whether or not I’m going to follow them back.

My only criteria for deciding are my answers to these two questions:

1) Does this person seem interesting?

and/or

2) Can I learn something from this person?

That’s it.

I used to make a point to follow a lot of social media/public relations/marketing people, but after a while, the echo-chamber-ness got to be too much. I try to follow fewer of the type of people in my field and more people that have nothing to do with it whatsoever. It’s those people that I find most interesting. Recently I started following some astronauts, some fake (parody) celebrities, some indie bands, a baseball team, some random brands, etc. I want to see how they use the service, and I want to learn something from them. Sometimes, I just want to laugh.

Once in a while, I use a third-party app to mass-unfollow the accounts that have fallen dormant or spammy. Rarely do I unfollow anybody manually. You’ve got to be super spammy or somehow really offend me to get me to unfollow you, and since it’s pretty hard to offend me (I’m pridefully un-PC), that doesn’t happen often.

So there ya go. That’s my “Twitter strategy,” or lack thereof. Now stop thinking so much about the tool and just have fun.

Image by pmarkham.

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Between friends getting married, friends passing away, getting used to a new schedule, and just overall life things, you could say I’ve had a lot going on lately. Sometimes, one can only take so much before wanting/needing to pull the plug on some things that cause more noise than signal in life.

The other day, after attending the funeral of a friend, I decided to quit Twitter for a while.

Many didn’t think I could do it. I’ve tried to “take a Twitter hiatus” before, and have only lasted a few days, at most. This time, however, I was pretty sure that I was done spewing <140 character blurts into the ether for a while. I just needed my “Stacy time,” my time to be lost in my own thoughts without the internet bugging me or me bugging it.

I really thought I could do it.

Fat chance.

It didn’t occur to me until after I had posted the above that even when I have no intention of tweeting, I tweet anyway. I’ve integrated so many webby things with my Twitter account that it’s nearly impossible.

Hitting the “Tweet this” button at the top of an interesting blog post or article after reading it has become second nature to me. BOOM! There’s a tweet.

If I subscribe to a YouTube channel? BOOM! There’s a tweet.

If I just “like” a video on YouTube? BOOM! There’s a tweet.

If I check in somewhere on FourSquare? You got it — BOOM! There’s a tweet.

You get the idea.

Not to mention, that if somebody chooses to retweet (RT) or reply to one of my auto-tweeted tweets, it’s usually appropriate to say something back to them.

Oh sure, I could manually go and remove all of my Twitter connections/integrations on each app, but really, that’s a lot to go though if I’m only planning on a temporary hiatus. Plus, I’d have to re-hook it all back up when I came back.

So I guess I’m stuck tweeting, whether I intend to or not.

I guess I just find it funny — these days, there are still hoards of people trying to figure out HOW to use Twitter and why; meanwhile, I’m so enmeshed in it that I can’t easily quit using Twitter, even if I wanted to.

Has anybody else had this problem?!

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It’s no secret that I hate the Twitter meme of #FollowFriday. I wrote a rant post back in March about why I’m not playing anymore, and I’ve stood by that pretty adamantly. Ari Herzog, who wrote a recent post about the meme, shares the same sentiment as I do, which is,

I recommend Twitter users every day–when retweeting their thoughts or web links, when thanking them for prior advice, or when singling out unique people.

I thought that the madness of the random, meaningless, lists of people to #FollowFriday (or #FF) recommend had ended since I wrote that post in March. I thought that things had calmed down.

So last Friday I dipped my toe back into the Follow Friday meme and posted a #FF recommendation and gave reason as to WHY people should follow that person, as one should. So far, so good.

Today I tweeted that I lost half a cookie in my morning coffee, in melodramatic distraught. Next thing I know, Cookie Monster is following me on Twitter. The Official Cookie Monster (not to be confused with all those Cookie Monster impostors out there, mind you). I felt rather honored that such Muppet royalty would follow me, so I recommended him for #FollowFriday. After all, his Twitter account is hilarious … assuming that’s the real Official Cookie Monster and not some paid personal Muppet assistant.

I was away from my computer the majority of the day. I came back and checked my notifications to find the usual handful of random people following me that I had never heard of. I always check out each individual person that follows me to 1) make sure they’re not a bot, and 2) see if they’re anybody I find interesting enough to follow in the 3 second glance I take at their profile.

One such profile was this, and I took sympathy on the woman to attempt to protect her identity and those of the people in her background:

Pardon my french, but…

WHAT THE HELL?!?!

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Since the advent of Twitter, and especially the ever-increasing popularity of its API, there has been an explosion of third-party applications using “tw-” as a prefix. We can list ourselves and find people by profession on  Twellow, measure somebody’s Twinfluence, watch and tweet Twiddeos, and if we have OS X, tweet from our dashboard via Twidget. The list of apps is practically infinite.

Of course, just as naturally, I suppose, has our lexicon increasingly been speckled with the “tw-” prefixed words, referring to anything Twitter-related. We have “tweetups,” refer to each other as “tweeple” or “tweeps,” the world of Twitter is known as the “Twitterverse,” and if we accidentally send a direct message to the public it’s a “twoops.”

There is no shortage of Twitter glossaries out there, but seriously, I think we’ve gone a little too far. The following is not something I am unlikely to hear in real life:

I went to a tweetup to meet my tweeple and got caught in twaffic, but once I got there it was twitterific!  What tweethearts they are! As we were enjoying twitteritas, one twude twinterjected and made a twitfessional that he needed a twatcation because his wife twinks he’s a twitaholic. We said that was twitdiculous!

Seriously?!

Look, folks – I understand the enthusiasm for Twitter. It’s wonderful. I’m practically married to it. But, please, please, PUH-LEASE–

STOP TALKING LIKE TWEETY BIRD!

It’s not cute, it’s not funny, it’s not even coherent most of the time. I don’t mean to be a “mean ol’ puddy tat” here, but every time I hear an adult confound the English language with such absurd Tweety Bird talk, I don’t want to follow them on Twitter — I want to put a helmet on them, give them some crayons, and take their cell phone away.

Is this just my exaggerated imagination, or are you hearing it, too?

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Last week I had a family emergency, and I tweeted it. To my recollection, I don’t remember having ever tweeted anything so. . . heavy like that. I think it’s safe to say that most people, as much as they preach about transparency in social media, probably would not have done that.

I did hesitate — briefly. But I chose to do it for a few reasons:

1. Some of my close “real life” friends are on Twitter, including my BFF Kelly (please tell her to change her username so she doesn’t look like a bot), whose parents are good friends with my parents, and the message would be relayed to the appropriate people.
2. For my own records.
3. I’m a social media transparency purist.
4. I’m also a Twitter addict. (I know, the first part is admitting it.)

Little did I expect to be flooded with 60+ @replies on Twitter when I signed back in that evening. I received multiple direct messages on my phone during the day from many people whom I had never met, and of course, text messages on my phone from those “real life” friends who have my number and knew it’d be OK.

All of these messages were supportive, and many people were praying/sending good vibes, hugs, etc. What I found most interesting, from an observer’s standpoint, is that many people insisted that I keep updating about the situation.

I want to thank everybody who @replied, texted, or direct messaged me throughout all this. Your thoughts, prayers, hugs, well wishes, etc. are much appreciated.

Mom came home on Friday, and the only thing the doctors  can figure out is that the extreme dizziness must’ve been dehydration combined with the wrong dosage of blood pressure medication. Luckily that’s all they can figure out — it could’ve been much worse.

In retrospect, I learned something from this experience, and that is this:

With all of its recent commercialization and mainstream exploitation, the merit of Twitter is still not lost.

In little blurts of 140 characters or less, people all over the world are relating to one another, showing their humanity and sending their support — in other words, people give a damn. Perhaps 140 characters isn’t a limit at all . . . maybe it’s a blessing.

Have you been surprised/overwhelmed at the outcome of support you’ve received on Twitter for anything? Have you tweeted about a personal/family situation that others might not have? What was it like?

Photo by Guanatos Gwyn.

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Not long ago I Tweeted and commented on a few blogs something along the sentiment of, “I wish mainstream media would STFU and get over their Twitter orgies already and just accept it as a way we communicate now.”

Because seriously, while I think it’s very useful for things like breaking news, Twitter ITSELF is not breaking news, but don’t tell CNN, FOX, ABC, Ellen DeGeneres, et. al.

Fellow Michigan-Tweeter Ryan Meray, replied and pointed me toward the social media blog over at Amplify, where I learned two things:

1. the end is nowhere near, and
2. The End really is near.

Oh, doublespeak, I love you so.

The Tweetpocalypse is coming, and it’s coming Friday, April 17, 2009:

Oprah is doing a show dedicated Twitter. . . with Ashton Kutcher.

From the blogs at New York Times:

The woman who can single-handedly send a new product or book flying off the shelves has just joined Twitter. She has not yet written a tweet, but more than 30,000 followers have already signed up to follow her every 140-character thought, and the number is growing. Rumor has it she will write her first tweet on Friday, when she is dedicating her show to Twitter. (It airs at 4 p.m. Eastern time — check your local listings here for details on viewing the show in your area.)

Ashton Kutcher will be on the show, according to Oprah’s Web site. He is one of Twitter’s most active celebrity twitterers and will most likely talk about his race with CNN to be the first to get a million followers.

Jimmy asks on Amplify what all this might mean. Has Twitter officially jumped the shark? “Tipped” as Malcolm Gladwell would say?

Among some banter back and forth between @RyanMeray and myself, it was decided that tomorrow is officially the TWEETOPRAHCALYPSE.

As I commented at Amplify,

I really admire and respect the Golden Touch of Oprah, but this time I’m afraid. I was a very early adopter, and am one in general, as I signed up for Twitter in April of 2007. The fact that Oprah’s coming is now. . . not only frightening, but starting to steer me away from it all together.

Is Twitter officially getting Punk’d? Or is Ashton Kutcher getting Punk’d by Twitter? Will the Oprah Touch cause the Fail Whale to emerge like the Cracken? Is this the end of the internets as we know it? What will happen?

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On my way home from a baseball game the other night I hit a deer. I am no stranger to roadkill, as this was (only?) my fourth car-deer collision and in the past I’ve hit all sorts of interesting things — not because I go out of my way to hit them (everyone knows I love all things cute and fuzzy) but because I’m convinced there are a lot of suicidal animals. Once I even ran over something in Mississippi I was convinced was an alien but found out upon examining it and getting a slap upside the head from my Southern-transplant friend Carrie that it was actually an armadillo.

I did a bit of research, and according to the Michigan Traffic Crash Facts website,

Michigan had 61,907 reported motor vehicle-deer crashes during 2007. 1,614 people were injured and 11 people were killed as a result of those collisions. . . Motor vehicle-deer crashes occurred most often in Michigan’s southern, heavily populated counties. . .

Wow. I was suprised to find out that Michigan is #2 behind Pennsylvania as the worst state for car-deer accidents. (I thought we were #1 . . . I’ll have to work on that.)

Aaaaaanyway . . . I’m OK, there was cosmetic damage to my car and a broken blinker, but it’s drivable (thanks for asking). The area that I was in, however, was rather remote and there’s no cell phone service so I couldn’t call and report the deer (who hobbled away, anyway — I was only going 30-35 mph) but for some reason I could text.

Then I thought to myself, “What a great use for Twitter — reporting roadkill!”

Upon poking around the internets the next night, imagine my surprise to find that the Michigan DNR has a Twitter account.

If only I had known.

I totally could have seen myself pulling over, opening up my cell phone, and texting “@MDNR hey I’m on ___ Road somewhere btwn Lansing & Linden & hit a deer. I’m OK, car’s OK, deer hobbled away, might wanna keep your eye out.”

I know that we’re finding all sorts of interesting uses for this service, including police departments and fire departments keeping the public informed, so I don’t see why not.

Now I’m wondering — have you ever found yourself in a situation where you thought, “Boy, I really could use Twitter for this . . .” ? What was it? Please, share with the rest of the class.

Bluejay pic by Kimberly Robyn. . . all the pics I found of deer roadkill were way too gross to include here.

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Would you buy a car from a salesman who didn’t have a drivers’ license?

Would you take tennis lessons from somebody who first picked up a racket last week?

Would you hire a nanny without first doing a background check?

Would you take singing lessons from Marge Simpson?

Didn’t think so.

So then, why would you pay to take a class on “How to Use Twitter Effectively for Business” by somebody whose Twitter ratio looks like this:

?

Whose Twitter stream was only broadcasting what they were doing — “come to my workshop” this and “my business is having an event on ___, here’s a link” that — and whose only visible interaction with anybody on Twitter was one lonely retweet . . . of their BUSINESS PARTNER’S, broadcasting yet another event they were having? Said person is also charging money to teach people how to use other social media tools “effectively” and “for your business” when they themselves are barely active on them.

One of my favorite people in the social media space (and now real life space), Amber Naslund, made a great point the other day:

Look, we need the craptastic shillers to showcase the good work when it’s done. We need examples of lousy results and scattershot tactics because the people that are really digging deep to do good work will eventually look that much more brilliant, and their results will be that much more compelling.

. . . and I agree with her, so I’m not about to beat a dead horse. Said shiller above is somebody local to me. I’m not going to waste the time and energy calling this person out because a) I’m classier than that, and b) the universe will balance it out in the end, but please, folks, all I ask is that you just do your homework a little bit before forking over your cash.

I’m leaving you with this commentary by Perry Belcher, a guy I totally admire and adore for his ability to tell it like it is:

Kind of reminds me of the old rhetorical quip:

What do you call the guy who graduated last in his medical school class?

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Not long ago, I wrote about why I’m not playing the #FollowFriday Twitter meme anymore, and I still stand by my sentiments in that post.

This morning I met a Twitter friend, @TJList, for the very first time, and not only was he kind and generous enough offter to drive up to my neck of the woods and video my presentation, but he came to the rescue when we discovered that the projector supplied was not compatible with my Mac. With some quick thinking and editing, we were able to translate my Keynote presentation to PowerPoint, put it on my flash drive, plug my flash drive into his PC laptop, and edit it (for the most part) so that it wasn’t as jumbled up as many times the translation from Keynote to PowerPoint goes. I wasn’t familiar with his computer at all (PCs seem rather backwards to me these days, though I can navigate them), but for being blindsided like that I think overall it went pretty well.

But honestly, I couldn’t have done it without him.

When I came back to the internet on my own computer and logged into TweetDeck, I was hit by a TON of @replies from my twitter friends who were saying nice things to me about one thing or another, whether it was considering me an honorary Detroiter (truth be told, I’m more of a Detroiter than a Flintstone, except when it comes to my coney preference), complimenting me on my new avatar pic that I took earlier in the day, or whatever. I had so many people saying so many nice things that I @replied a lot of folks and said, “I’ll call this #thankyouthursday”.

It caught on, and I inadvertently started a new meme.

Now that I think about it, I am so grateful for so many of my Twitter friends, those that I’ve met in real life and those that I haven’t yet, that I can’t believe we haven’t been doing this all along. It seems silly NOT to recognize those who say nice things to us or do nice things for us, even if it is on this “silly little online microblogging thingie” called Twitter. Twitter is invaluable to me, as I’m sure it is to many of you. Let’s not wait until Thanksgiving time to thank our Twitter pals for whatever you want to thank them for.

From now on, every Thursday I’m thanking some of my Twitter friends and hashtagging it #ThankYouThursday, because I believe expressing gratitude to deserving tweeple is much more meaningful than encouraging people to follow others for undeclared reasons.

So for my very first #ThankYouThursday, I would like to publicly recognize the following Tweeple:

@TJList – as stated above, without him, I would not have been able to do my presentation at all this morning

@mcwflint – for her mentorship, assistance, and advice on the presentation I this morning

@nickstaroba – for designing my new logo (which will be soon revealed on this site) on such a time crunch & being patient with my pickiness

@simplyjennifer – for being my go-to gal (for years) for all things geeky that my geekiness can’t figure out

@MotorCity - for considering me an honorary Detroiter

@LaurenWeber84 @EstrellaBella10 @ddelonge @charbrown @ctham @davepeckens @lisarobbinyoung @DJPlazma @bethkostecki @sslyb @AmeliaHelen -  for the compliments on my new avatar picture

So there’s my first list of #ThankYouThursday thank-yous. Obviously, it’s a Twitter meme, not a blog meme, I just did this as an initiation.  So now on Thursdays, tweet your thanks to a person, say why, & tag it #ThankYouThursday to tell the Twitterverse why that person is so nice.

My only concern is that maybe the tag is too long – #ThankYouThursday is 17 characters long. Should we shorten it to #TYThursday? Or maybe #ThanksThurs?

Let me know what you guys think in the comments.

Thanks!

La la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la la . . .

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