Followers are fickle people. One seemingly insignificant tweet can be the hair that breaks the camel’s back. It can cause them to unfollow you if resentment over what you post, how often you post or how boring your posts are has already grown in them.

While these rules are highly subjective as others may have bigger Twitter pet peeves  – or, as I like to call them, Twitpeeves – I think these three should be added to anyone’s list of Twitter Best Practices.

Rule # 1 of Twitter – Shortened links can be scary. Explain what they are or where they lead people

Rule # 2 of Twitter – When you’re explaining where your shortened links lead, make sure you do so in a compelling way. You have about 120 characters (after you post a shortened link) to grab attention so you have to be clear and very concise as you write what is essentially your link’s headline

Rule # 3 of Twitter – I don’t care how important you think the information you’re tweeting is; please don’t tweet it more than twice in a row over an extended period of time

Want to learn more about the rules? Check out my article in Cincom’s business e-zine, Expert Access

I’m a huge fan of Peter Shankman. His site is compelling and I never get tired of learning from his blog posts. It’s definitely on my radar to check at least once a week, if not more.

Brogan was a bit of a different story. I hadn’t heard too much about him before today, but coincidentally, I stumbled across his Web site a couple of days ago and thought he had some good information. After hearing from him today, I know I’ll head back there more often.

The call today centered around the best ways to acheive visibility with social media. Both stressed that while companies need to create content for their social media sites, and they need to listen to feedback, the most important aspect of social media (and what you should spend the bulk of your time on) is commenting and communicating.

Creating a dialogue  or an interaction with the people who comment, re-tweet, follow or friend you is the best way to grow your audience, they said.

Shankman also provided a lot of information on Case Studies about social  media usage. His example of the Capitol Hotel in Historic Little Rock, Arkansas‘ use of FourSquare was a great example of how an emerging social media outlet can benefit B2C corporations (is it just me, or does FourSquare seem to be everywhere these days?!).

The best part about this call, however, was that the two didn’t ignore the fact that there were bound to be some B2B companies (like my current employer, Cincom) on the call as well! More often than not, these calls are interesting, but don’t provide us any valueable information we can implement at work. Shankman and Brogan’s insight into content marketing was great, though – even if they did tell us to write “sexy” headlines … I’m not sure that will be the adjective I present to my product groups when I attempt to provide a valuable headline for their blog posts, I think they’d be scandalized.

I edited the video using Final Cut Express and they are all uploaded on Cincom’s YouTube channel – http://www.youtube.com/cincomvideo

Two of the winner’s videos are posted below. You can find the other 11 on YouTube.

Misty Stevens presented for her company BiologicsMD, LLC from the University of Arkansas. BiologicsMD, LLC was the grand prize winner of the competition winning $10,000 and an automatic bid to the MOOT Corp Competition in May. At the MOOT Corp competition, the team will be competing for $135,000.

Purdue University’s team – GlucaGO LLC – won the Taxi/Limo Round and $1,000 towards their venture. After filming, they informed me that they have already won a business plan competition that provided them an automatic bid to the MOOT Corp competition, so they will be competing for the grand prize at the University of Texas at Austin in early May as well.

Read it here on the Intelligent-Guidance site.

It can also be found on Business Exchange, which is BusinessWeek’s site that works to connect communities around topics of interest.

The site recently went live and can be viewed at http://intelligent-guidance.cincom.com.

Excellent knowledge of AP Style, QuarkXPress and Microsoft Office

3rd place Best In-Depth Reporting – “Exec stipend draws criticism at Saint Mary’s”