Knowing who you should follow and getting recommendations and insights from the network of people you follow is important in making twitter more valuable to you and your business use of twitter.

Every Friday on Twitter there is a phenomenon called “Follow Friday”. Basically people will tweet who they recommend that people should follow. Think of it as a lightweight recommendation or endorsement activity engine. This will help you to find and follow the people that you want in your network of connections.

Here are 7 Best Practices to use when engaging in Follow Friday on Twitter.

1. Use the hash tag (the pound sign # = hash tag) and include this in the body of your tweet #followfriday

2. Recommend people who you think are worthy of following and that your network would benefit from following and connecting with them.

3. Break out your #followfriday tweets by some sort of category if possible. For example I might recommend people that are great analysts, engineers, foodies, artists, software developers, branding or marketing executives by specifically stating in my tweet why you should follow them.

4. Use Follow Friday to give back value to your followers network and reward the people that you respect and whose tweets you find valuable. Make sure you include the @ before the name so that people can easily click to that users profile page.

5. One of the keys of all social networks is that you have to give to get. So give and share the brain trust of people that you think are deserving of it. It will come back to you in the form of more loyal and engaged network!

6. Watch for your network to recommend people via Follow Friday and you can discover some real gems and make connections quickly. Pay special attention to the people that you respect.

7. Don’t blindly follow everyone that is recommended. Allocate a few minutes and check out the bio and tweets from the recommended people before you decide to follow those recommendations.

Here is a sample #followfriday tweet and an effective way to communicate who you are recommending and why.

Happy Following! FYI you can follow me at @Rumford

TWEETSTATS is useful to reveal tweeting behavior of any Twitter users. It consolidates and collates Twitter activity data and present them in colorful graphs. Its Tweet Timeline is probably the most interesting, as it shows month-by-month total tweets since your joined Twitter (TweetStats showed Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, started tweeting since March 2006; 80 tweets during that month). Twitterholic can also show when a person joined Twitter but not in graphical format. Other metrics include (a) Aggregate Daily Tweets - total tweets, by day (c) Aggregate Hourly Tweets - total tweets, by hour (d) Tweet Density: hourly Twitter activities over 7 days period (e) Replies to: top 10 persons you’ve replied and (f) Interfaces Used: top 10 clients used to access Twitter. In addition, its Tweet Cloud allows you to see the popular words you used in your tweets.

Twitter founders interviewed at All Things D event in Carlsbad yesterday. a great 10 minutes interview with Walt Maoosberg and Kara Swisher from the Wall Street Journal. There are lots of nuggets about where Twitter is headed and how they have hit over 30 Million monthly users. It is moving beyond the early adopters and into the mainstream very rapidly. They get asked some tough questions.

Sit thru the 10 second commercial. The 10 minute video is really good. it is all the highlights from the interview from the WSJ team.

OK It is official… The “Oprahfication” of Twitter has become a reality. Today Oprah had Twitter co-founder EV on the show as well as Ashton Kutchner (@aplusk) while Oprah did her first tweet… which as a funny side note was all in CAPS

Why does this matter if celebrities use twitter and tweet? It is only mildly interesting to follow celebrities from my perspective. However we happen to live in a celebrity obsessed culture where people want a peek behind the velvet rope and a peek into the “lifestyles of the rich and famous”… Remember that show? The proof here is that Oprah set a Twitter Follower Velocity Record: 225,000 followers in 13 hours. At this rate she will kick Ashton Kutchner’s butt in the number of twitter followers in under a few days.

The big news story is not that Oprah is on twitter. The BIG news is that Oprah has huge Gravitational pull in social networks. She has the ability to get soccer moms that are technophobes to try new stuff and push their boundaries. This is great news as twitter is a new communication channel and the value of the eco-system and network increases as more people use it.

Twitter can be a broadcast distribution channel and that is exactly Oprah’s use case. It works for her and celebs.

Here is the video with Oprah and Gal Pals tweeting it up and chatting with Ashton Kutchner

Twitter is moving even more mainstream as we see it included in commercials.The mention of Twitter in this recent Sprint Advertisement is mildly brilliant and quite funny if you happen to use Twitter “233K people just twittered on twitter….. and 26% of you have no idea what that means”. The joke here is that people that are on Twitter get it and it is like being part of the hip group.

Hat Tip to the people at Sprint for this one. Well Done.

Twitter is announcing a new hand held device that appears to be like a full featured twitter interaction device. Word on the street is that the Twitter Wingman will be released in 3 months to the general public. Tentatively named the Twitter Wingman; it is roughly the size of a large page device, it has enhanced features such as:
** Ability to group people (big value there)
** Built in 5 Meg camera with a flash
** A $30 - 40 price tag with a two-year contract on Boost Mobile
** Integrated GPS with real time maps that allow you to locate other Wingmen in the area.
** Bluetooth data transfers between Wingmen.
** Dedicated hot keys for sending direct tweets, picking up new followers, and retweeting.

Check out more details in this great video from the team at WIRED.

While all of this could prove promising… I have to ask myself… “Do I really need to carry another device? Couldn’t we just build most of this functionality right into an iphone app?” This clearly does have a push to drive more acceptance on the low end based upon the price point. Let’s not forget that once you have a device like this it could become a very solid channel to drive geo specific & relevant advertising through.

Although this is an April fools joke. It is not too nutty to become something that just might work.

I was on PBS Marketplace this morning talking about Twitter with technology & entrepreneur reporter Mitchell Hartman. We were discussing the future of Twitter and how it is moving into directions that is not obvious to many just yet. Here are a few quotes from the clip:

“Rodney Rumford is author of the book “Twitter as a Business Tool”: Programmers could find a way to tie into the machine-language level and interface that with real-world, let’s call them “life-hack” type of devices. This means machines communicating with other machines, plants or animals communicating with us. It also means we can interact with the computers that crunch all the data being collected every minute on Twitter.”

“Rumford says Twitter is allowing us to create new social intelligence about ourselves at breakneck speed. They’ve really developed the tube, if you will, for this data to flow through. And an easy tube to plug into. Rumford’s favorite new toy: a GPS mapping program that tracks fellow-tweeters in real-time so you can go meet them for drinks or a movie. If you can put your cell phone down that long.”

Have a listen to the audio clip from the radio program.

You can grab the full show notes and resources mentioned over at Marketplace:

As an interesting side note. The PBS reporter Mitchell Hartman @entrepreneurguy live tweeted his highlights from the show as it aired live on the radio. (we were both up at 3:49am Pacific Time for this)

Pepsi has done what smart brands will be doing in the future. Get out of the way and let the experience happen. Anything that a brand can do that puts them in the middle of facilitation, connection, conversations and exposing people with similar interests can be a powerful brand and marketing experience.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what is possible in creating a unique branded experience that leverages the Twitter API and content for companies. The possibilities are endless. Creative ideation needs to take place to ensure that a compelling experience can be created that aligns with a brands core values and customers. We have service offerings that will create compelling experiences for brands and companies. Consumer brands and the entertainment industry needs to pay close attention.

Contact me and we can help your brand in these types of branded endeavors.

See what Pepsi had to say about what they were doing in Social Media at SXSW.

Screw the phone…  I tweet for customer service. I came across this video from Fox Chicago on how Twitter users are going to Twitter FIRST for customer service and support and completely bypassing calling traditional help channels such as phone support. The point that brands and businesses need to take away is the fact that people are going to twitter for customer service and expecting interactions ans resolution from the brands via Twitter.

Twitter for customer service and support is but one of many use cases of Twitter as a business tool. It just happens to be a piece of low hanging fruit in the twittersphere. I know that I tweeted @starbucks because I could not find out how many weight watchers points were in a mocha frappicino while I was trying to lose weight . They responded and tweeted me where I could find the information, nice! So is your company there?

What is the best interaction that you have seen via twitter for customer service or support? Please leave a comment.
This video is calling Twitter the cyber complaint window. Indeed.

I can say with certainty that Twitter is aiming for the mainstream. They are trying to move past the early adopters and heavy tech users. Why do I say this? Well just a few hours ago Twitter has started to “educate” their users with word definitions for words such as “Widget”. They started showing these word definitions on the home page of users profiles with short “Simple Simon” types of descriptions.

A widget in the simplest of terms is a self contained mini-data delivery device for web site content. They allow content to be distributed to multiple sites in a compact size. In the case of Twitter it allows your latest tweets to be displayed on your website or blog by simply cutting and pasting a code snippet.

Here is an example of a live twitter widget. Put one on your site and users will see your latest tweets as well as number of followers.

Here is a short video interview where Jeremiah Owyang who is an analyst at Forrester Research asked me “what is a widget” about 18 months ago. We talk a bit about facebook, but the concepts fully apply.