Twittering Tentacles Batman!

I was somewhat wary about joining Twitter. I have totally abandoned Facebook and Myspace as timewasters. However, after barely a week I’m hooked on tweeting and I have discovered some very useful add-ons which are letting me get to a whole world of potential customers.

Number 1 add-on has to be Twitterhawk - this invaluable little gadget enables me to sniff out what the Twitter world is tweeting about and tweet anyone who uses my designated keywords in their tweets. There are limitations of course, or Twitterhawk would probably be the world’s biggest spammer. Basically you are supposed only be able to send 6 messages per day, one for each of your keyword sets.

You are allowed 6 keyword sets and 5 different messages per keyword set which auto-cycle. You can auto-send the second, someone uses your keywords or the Twitterhawk system will queue your messages for approval. However, there seem to be some dodges around this. I queued my outgoing tweets and found that it seemed to have multiple messages for the same keyword set and it let me send all of them.

Also, if you use up all your 6 messages for the day, it appears that if you delete them, and set up new ones, you can do it all over again. There are ingenious ways that you can query what the world’s Twitterers are saying.

Setting a keyword of ‘tuna ?’ for example will pick up a message that has the word tuna in it and is also a question, as in "Did you have tuna sandwiches for lunch ?

"prawn salad" near:"Baltimore" will detect a message such as "I’m having prawn salad for dinner" which was sent within 15 miles of anywhere called Baltimore. Don’t ask me how it distinguishes between different Baltimore’s - I have no idea. Does it know the difference between multiple Portsmouths in the USA and Portsmouth UK for example - I’m asking!

Tweetergetter gets you what amounts to thousands of free leads by a viral method. I set it going this morning, but I can’t tell whether the people who joined me today as followers came in that way or not. It seems like a great idea and requires no effort anyway so take a look at the linky.

Now Tweetdeck. I’ve downloaded this and I am trying to figure out whether it is a more efficient method of managing my Twitter feeds or not. Jury’s out.

So, what was it about tentacles then Robin?.

Ages ago, someone showed me a diagrammatic method of managing your time and organizing your ideas. For instance - you are working out what your priorities are for the day. You have an idea that one particular topic is the most important for you to concentrate on. So take a blank sheet of paper and write your topic right bang in the middle of it. Let’s say you have a new business opportunity or promotion method you want to get out to all your friends in different social and business network. Draw lines outwards from your original topic and write in the group names.

As you do this, you will find yourself thinking of links from those, which might be other things to do related to that group, but not to the original topic or subdivisions. You’ll end up with first of all something that looks like a creature with lots of tentacles, and then spawns other multi-tentacled creatures.

You can also use this method for developing ideas and projects. I even used it as a therapy for my depression to see where different thoughts were leading me and identify solutions and antidotes. That was really helpful. It is a very useful technique and I can recommend.

It has a proper name, if anyone can tell me, please comment- thanks.