Basically, if you are endorsing or promoting products or services on your sites, you should take a moment to make sure these endorsements are in compliance with the federal guidelines. As the FTC reports, “If there’s a connection between the endorser and the marketer of the product that would affect how people evaluate the endorsement, it should be disclosed.” Learn more.

This week’s Ad Age paints a picture of these social media users. There’s demographic information about the sites, based on actual user profiles … not just web traffic.  Along with nifty infographics about users’ ages, you’ll find data about users’ outside interests, countries of origin, and more. 

For example, LinkedIn is skewing much older than MySpace. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who has used both social media sites. But the fact that India is the second highest nation using LinkedIn? Now, that’s interesting… Go check it out.

Extra extra. Want to catch up on the latest news while on Twitter? Following are 20 newspapers you can follow:

Twenty newspapers to follow on Twitter…

• Atlanta Journal-Constitution – @ajc
• Austin Statesman – @statesman
• Boston Globe – @bostonupdate
• Chicago Tribune – @chicagotribune
• Chicago Sun Times – @suntimes
• Cleveland Plain Dealer – @clevelanddotcom
• Dallas Morning News – @dallas_news
• Detroit Free Press – @freep
• Denver Post – @denverpost
• Los Angeles Times – @latimes
• Minneapolis Star Tribune – @StarTribune
• New York Times – @nytimes
• Newsday – @newsday
• Philadelphia Inquirer – @phillyinquirer
• San Diego Union-Tribune – @SDUT
• Seattle Times – @seattletimes
• St. Petersburg Times – @tampabaycom
• The Oregonian – @Oregonian
• USA Today – @usatoday
• Wall Street Journal – @wsj

White Willow Media is headed by social media maven Jean Ann Van Krevelen, who has been called “one of the most influential garden communicators in the country.” In addition to yours truly, her team features such heavyweights as Ellen Wells of Flower Ink and Mike Lieberman of Urban Organic Gardener.

Along with Mediaverks’ other services, this new White Willow partnership provides companies with a full spectrum of solutions from traditional marketing to social media training, search engine optimization and blog creation. Learn more.

Now I can’t promise that Twitter will get you a book deal, of course. But I can promise this book would never have happened without social media.

The project was dreamed up by Jean Ann Van Krevelen, named among Twitter’s “Top 50 to Follow” in 2008.  She found her three co-authors on Twitter, and with the help of Facebook, blogs and Twitter, ensured thousands had heard about Grocery Gardening before the book was even finished. Many readers contributed family recipes and personal photos. Others provided real-time feedback to the authors during the entire project. Despite the many participants, the book was written in record time, within 60 days.

How can you apply this story to your business? Consider these ten tips for using Twitter:

Tweet: You only have 140 characters to make your tweets interesting, helpful or even funny. Just remember once you’ve written it, that tweet remains on Google. So, think before you tweet. Make sure your tweets reflect your professional image.

1. Connect: Find people with similar interests at wefollow.com. Tweets about various topics are organized by hashtags (#hashtags), so search those too. Also see who your favorites follow, or go to wefollow.com and search by interests.
2. Listen: Twitter works best as a conversation, not as a monolog about yourself. Download free browsers like TweetDeck or Seesmic. They allow you to read tweets about yourself and others. Plus, you can easily upload photos into tweets, and shorten hyperlinks to save characters.
3. Mingle: Consider Twitter as the 21^st century’s equivalent to the office water cooler. It’s your chance to show what you know. Contribute value to Twitter discussions. Start building relationships with key targets. Remember: Twitter is all about communicating with others.
4. Value: Don’t be one-sided or overly self-promotional in your tweets. Unless you’re a celebrity or particularly interesting, most people won’t follow those who talk only about themselves. Remember it’s very easy to “unfollow” people.  Want to supply value? Link to news and videos from reputable sources on topics interesting to your followers.
5. Reciprocity: The more you support others on Twitter, the more they’ll support you as well. Retweet (RT) tweets you find interesting. Recommend others to follow on #FollowFriday (#FF). You’ll be surprised how quickly your followers grow exponentially when you play nicely on Twitter.
6. Spam: Direct messages (DM) are private messages, and can only be sent to those following you. Don’t send automated DMs when people follow you. Many consider them spam and will stop following you.
7. Feedback: “Twitter is the only medium where we can have a two-way continuous dialog about the brand,” said PepsiCo’s social media director. You can do the same by soliciting real-time feedback on products, promotions, trends and industry issues in your tweets.
8. Monitor: To track sales for its frozen treats, Tasti D-lite uses special codes on Twitter-related promotions. When Gayla Trail launched a gardening book, she asked followers to retweet the message to enter the book giveaway contest. Hundreds of retweets resulted, reaching thousands of potential readers.
9. Fun: Twitter isn’t going anywhere soon. So, you might as well jump in and start having fun. Make the effort to learn more about this business tool, and you’ll probably have success stories of your own to share soon.

This bylined article was previously published in Idaho Women’s Journal.

This Mediaverks blog is designed to be interactive. Do you agree or disagree with a particular trend addressed in this blog? Do you have something you’d like to share? Go right ahead. Your comments are welcome, as long as they are polite and relevant. 

Hope to see you again.