I’ll save that post for another day (although I’ve written about it before, try searching my blog to find Twitter posts, there are a lot of them).

If you understand what Twitter is, here are my Top 3 Tips for better Twittering:

• Don’t try to read every single tweet — Twitter messages — that the people you follow send, it gets overwhelming very quickly.
• Reply to others early and often, it build good will and you’ll get more from the Twitter experience this way.
• Search for conversations you may be interested in and join-in! — use Twitter Search to search by topic.

If this wasn’t a “Top 3″ what tips would you share? There are a lot of different ways to Tweet, and this is only one way to do it.

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1. @ddmcd - “Don’t Twitter anonymously — identify real people with specific addresses.”
2. @shawnr - “Tell them to NOT add their RSS feed to their Twitter stream — That’s one of my big annoyances with the Tweet…”
3. @RockinPRGirl - “The most important thing they need to do is listen and interact with others. Just broadcasting is not going to work.”
4. @Stacybond - “(1) Promote streams on the air (2) Send something out at least 3 times a day per station/twice if you’re a show (3) Use hostnames.”

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What is so cool now is that widgets are so easy to customize and deploy! Check out the YouTube widget below that pulls from the PBS YouTube feed, all it does it cycle through the latest videos uploaded to the account. This took me about 5 minutes to build and deploy, imagine if I were a designer and actually customized the look and feel of it…

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I’ve brightened things up, reorganized a few pages, and have a new header that’s more descriptive of what I do. This site is definitely a work in progress, but this is a step in the right direction.

I couldn’t have done this design refresh without the care and help of WebSketchz.com, Meji did some design work, tweaked the CSS code, and went through a bunch of revisions and nitpicking with me. She did great work and I’m glad to have worked with them.

Please have a look around and let me know what you think. By the way, very soon I’ll be Creative Commons’ing all of my content so let me know what YOU would like to see on this site.

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(And their logo changes daily, which I LOVE)

I must admit, I usually hear about cool new web sites pretty quickly, and not always because I try. Usually someone else forwards me a link, or I see a blog post, or announcement, or a Tweet about a new service.

Almost instinctively anymore I visit these sites that people recommend to me and make a snap judgement about whether or not it’s worth it to me to actually sign up and try it. Daily Mugshot caught my eye this past weekend, mainly because it follows in the same lines as Twitter, 12seconds, and other such ‘blips’ in the social media sphere.

Twitter has a lot of value to me, 12 seconds I’m still trying to figure out, Daily Mugshot on the other hand is perfect not for smucks like me, but for BABIES! This site would truly be a grandmother’s dream come true. Imagine waking up everyday and seeing a new picture of your grandchild - taken that day.

I’m going to declare this web site as being the end to the age-old saying “he/she is growing like weeds” (what your family didn’t say that? hmmmm). Grandma’s everywhere rejoice because who doesn’t want to see a lovey image of the dear cute babies each and every day?

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Sure, they’re want to be a public company, they’ve got thousands of employees, millions of dollars worth of bills, and a (shrinking) market cap to deal with. But really, why don’t they embrace the fact that they enable millions of people to communicate, share, and collaborate on a daily basis?

You don’t see Facebook posting to Twitter or Pownce, you don’t see Facebook responding to blog posts written about them, you don’t see Facebook reaching out to their community for feedback - well ok, they do a little bit, especially by way of support tickets - but none the less, what is it that prevents a social media company from truly being “social”?

If you ask me, a social networking company should be very visible in the social networking space, not just asuaging the egos of the Twitterati or leaking info to powerful blogs, but connecting on a personal level with the people who made them who they are.

What do you think, should “social media” companies be involved in “social media” and following their own best practices?

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Lately I’ve been hearing more and more about how Facebook’s traffic and users are trending older, and that is likely very true (as it becomes more mainstream) but the power and trend here is really that sheer number of college students who use Facebook as their primary method of communication with friends. Sure cell phone bills are at all time highs, but where the social web really meets Millennials - and younger - is on Facebook.

What I cannot figure out is why colleges and universities haven’t done more to embrace the social phenomenon by way of official groups, Fan pages of campus landmarks, buildings, or people. Certainly the Athletic departments at every major college and university has already setup Groups and Fan Pages on Facebook already (haven’t they?), why haven’t the admissions reps, professors, and support staff embraced it as a great opportunity to connect and share with people who are highly engaged and ready to learn?

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A pita shaped like lips! It’s the craziest thing. Unfortunately it wasn’t a Jesus shaped pita, otherwise I’d be posting this to eBay instead of my blog. The picture follows.

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I do want to preface each of these reviews with the web technology or content management system (CMS) these media outlets are using.

The CMS decision a media outlet chooses (often a business decision more than a content decision unfortunatey) has a great effect on what they’re able to do without trying extra hard and breaking out of the confines of the particular system they’re using.

KHOU.com is a Belo station, using a custom built CMS common to Belo owned television stations.

KHOU unfortunately had one of the least informative web sites of the Houston market. Their site was predominently weather based, very important information during a hurricane no doubt! However, after the storm passed through their area it seems no changes were made.

What I’m seeing across most of the media web sites in Houston is that shortly after 11 am Saturday morning they switched gears from weather related focuses to breaking news mode, presenting information on recovery and rebuilding.

As of Sunday afternoon KHOU was still predominantly showing weather information on their web site, with news updates further down the page.

The Good:

• Weather maps and information very clear and easy to read, constantly updated
• A Blog with updates being sent very quickly. They were writing short, concise updates quite often. This is what emergency based news should be. The screenshot below shows the blog at one point Sunday afternoon.

  

The Bad

• Very little user interaction, comments were open on the blog but the barrier to entry was too high. The blog was not linked prominently on the homepage and it took me several minutes to find.
• KHOU was taking advantage of a PHPbb discussion board. These boards were getting fairly consistent traffic and served their purpose of creating conversations. One problem I encountered was that the boards required registration, however the links to the registration form was buried at the bottom of the page. Also, the system would let me get so far as to hit Submit for a comment before giving me an error saying I had to be registered.

  

• User generated content was minimal and hard to find throughout the site. There were solicitations to send in photos and videos on the KHOU homepage, however it was not
• The station’s official Twitter stream was a purely one-way road, the opposite of the spirit of Twitter and online conversation. KHOU was simply automatically piping in the latest headline from their site. They did not have any profile information entered, and had no avatar (profile image)

Overall, it’s unfortunate that that user experience around Hurricane Ike on this particular web site was so poor.

–

This post is part of the Hurrricane Ike Media Review series by Jonathan Coffman. I welcome your comments below.

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What I’ll focus on:

• Update frequency
• Web site usability
• User generated content solicitation and usage
• Multi-media coverage
• Distribution of content outside the “walled garden”
• Innovation, or lack thereof in coverage

Where I’m coming from:

• I have family who lives in a Houston suburb
• I am familiar with the Houston television market having visited several of the TV studios and spoken with employees there in the past
• I live in the Washington DC area, so do not have access to live television or radio coverage from Houston unless streaming media is available
• I work in social media for a major media company
• My background is in journalism, information distribution, and online community building

If you have any questions please feel free to leave them in the comments section of any post. Notice someone doing something that I’ve missed? Let me know and I’ll be sure to update posts or continue the series as necessary.

Each of the media outlets I’ll profile and review this week are major operations with large audiences. I don’t want to be too critical of efforts or insinuate that there is any one “right” way of doing things online because there isn’t. What I’m measuring them against are what I consider to be the current “best practices” in online media distribution.

Also understand that each of these companies have very different technical and infrastructure components which I’ll address where possible.

–

This post is part of the Hurrricane Ike Media Review series by Jonathan Coffman. I welcome your comments below.

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