This guide is not meant as an end all to Twitter and using Twitter in your advertising or marketing strategy. Every business has to approach Twitter differently. This guide just covers the basics of Twitter and how to use it effectively.

First off, open a free account at Twitter.com. Avoid using long screen names like BarbadosOctopusAssociates. You are limited to 140 characters in a tweet and many Twitter users get their updates on their cell phones via text message. Since those are limited 160 characters, a shorter name would server you well once you are up and running on Twitter.

Now once you are set up, you can post. You may find yourself confused or lost in Twitter. It takes some time to get it, some time to understand how it works. Hopefully, this guide can jump start that process.

You will notice you start off following people by default. These people are selected by Twitter staff as long established Twitter users. You may want to stop following them as I am mostly sure their tweets will not be relevant to your career and company, let’s work on finding people that might interest you.

Surf over to ExecTweets.com. It is a website for executives in all industries who use Twitter effectively. Click on the BROWSE BY INDUSTRY link and select you industry. Read through those tweets and see if there is anyone saying something you find interesting. If so, click on their photo (this takes you back to the Twitter site) and click on FOLLOW. This will put their tweets in your homepage. Add somewhere between 10 and 20, this will give you enough to start getting a feel for how the system works.

Or if that sounds a bit daunting, here are some corporate Twitter users you might find valuable, regardless of your industry. Just click on the word FOLLOW under their pic to add them.

http://twitter.com/mridley
http://twitter.com/philjohnson
http://twitter.com/CandidCIO
http://twitter.com/stormbear
http://twitter.com/TEDchris
http://twitter.com/jillwhalen

Once your home page is fully populated, you will see strange things and unusual shorthand notations. There are three things you need to understand, the use of the @ symbol, the # symbol and the compressed URL.

Here is a sample message from me to Twitter user, NimbusAgency

@nimbusagency The Future of HR Was Here 2 Years Ago – http://is.gd/pMOV #linkedin #twitter #facebook #jobs #hr

What in the world does all that jabber mean? Here is the Tweet broken down into the vital parts…

This tweet was directed to user NimbusAgency. When you put the @ symbol in front of an individual’s Twitter user name, a copy of the tweet will end up in their Twitter account. This allows you to carry on a conversation. If you every want to tweet to me, simple use @stormbear somewhere in your tweet and I will get it.

The second part of the message is a title of an article I wrote, The Future of HR Was Here 2 Years Ago.

The next part, http://is.gd/pMOV, is a condensed URL to the story. Remember, each tweet is limited to 140 characters. The original URL for this article is…
http://www.stormbear.com/2009/03/30/the-future-of-hr-was-here-2-years-ago/

That URL has over 50 characters, so you need to shorten that down. Surf over to http://is.gd and take a look at them. Just paste the URL you want to shorten into the box and click compress. The next page will show you a shortened address. Just cut and paste that link into your tweet and save space.

The last part of the tweet has a string of words that has the #symbol in front of them, these are called “hash tags.” They are keywords for Twitter. Sometimes your tweets will use all 140 characters for the message you want to convey. But many tweets you have room left over, that extra room can be used for hash tags. Think of a one word description of what your tweet is about and type that word in and make sure it has the # in front of it. Below are some sample hash tags.

#marketing #jobs #weather #bailout #apple #porsche #wedding #lasvegas #fashion #advertising #sushi

Remember, you can use any word as a hash tag, but only one word. If you want to use Las Vegas as a hash tag, take the space out as in the example above.

For more information, check out the above YouTube video from one of the founders of Twitter.

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Every time I send a PDF to a print shop for a job, they need to know the Pantone Color number of EVERY COLOR USED in the PDF unless it is a photographic image. Then they switch to CMYK (explained below) and then I need to trot down to the print shop and give “loop approval” of the final photo print.

This LINK has a good, old-fashioned flame war over Gimp, Photoshop and Pantone.

Then there is the issue of CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and key) color to overcome. Adobe guards their CLUT (color look up tables) viciously, these are the translators that translates between RGB and CMYK.

Don’t get me wrong, I would love a great open source graphic arts studio suite I could use. As it stands, it costs me about $4,000 – $5,000 per seat in graphic software and support software per artist. Then there are the costs of constant upgrades to keep up with. Drives me nuts. Then there are the costs for Photoshop and Illustrator filters – add another $5k per seat. Don’t get me started on font control.

To really offer a professional alternative I think the community needs to rethink the approach according to filling the pro needs. This has been done with accountants, writers and administrative office workers, but not the graphics part of the creative class.

What a graphics pro needs…
1) Ability to use TrueType and OpenType fonts. (This has already been achieved in Windows and Mac and I guess it has been done for Linux).

2) Bitmapped image graphics manipulation app. This is Photoshop’s main job. Manipulating bitmapped images.

3) Vector graphics images. Vector art is where the image is made up of lines (defined by mathematical equations) instead of pixels.

4) Layout app. – The granddaddy is Pagemaker, an app that can pull in bit mapped images, vector art images and fonts into a file and produce a MULTI page file. Catalogs are an example of the end result of a Layout app. It is also used in newspapers and magazines. Other closed source apps are Quark and Adobe’s InDesign.

5) Bullet points 2, 3 & 4 must work seamlessly together.

6) An open source font management app similar to Suitcase.

7) Apps 2, 3 & 4 are App 6 aware. For example, when a document is opened, it installs the needed font for that doc but does not copy it to the system resources. Adobe products are all “Suitcase Aware” for example.

Open source Pantone equivalent. This is a must have and all open source graphic apps must be able to use this system. We all need OpenTone!

9) Most print shop business originates from in-house graphics departments or ad agencies. So from a strategic point of view, you need to get these open source apps running on Macs ASAP. You are not going to have big movements towards Linux for graphic arts pros, no matter what Dell or HP does until the above issues are solved.

These print shops are not going to do anything until the printer manufacturers begin adopting new OpenTone and OpenArtFile (replacement for PDF) technologies in their systems. And it is pointless for me to use open source stuff in my shop until print shops have equipment to read it.

Overcoming the issues surrounding print preflighting will also help a lot.

If the open source community wants to make an impact, here is where I would start if they want to change the way I MUST do business.

A) Start work on OpenTone and let artists have some input on this. Websafe colors is an example of geeks not understanding artistic use of color. I understand why websafe was put together the way it was, but it is no where near a great color palette.

B) Keep pushing open source PDF efforts to better serve vector and layout applications.

C) Take Inkscape and Gimp for the Mac and translate them to run natively on Mac OS (move from X11 to Cocoa based Intel). That takes care of items 2 & 3.

D) Begin developing the open source layout app.

E) Start working on the font management app. You can’t just load 40,000 fonts into your system. (I have tried!!!)

So for now, I am stuck with Adobe and will be for the next decade unless the open source community get serious about opening up the graphic arts world like they did with Microsoft Office. I think one reason they were successful with OpenOffice was the common hatred of Microsoft. That passion does not exist for Adobe.

I hope this helps better explain the path to get real open solutions for graphic artists.

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