A really short guide to Twitter

For a couple of years now, I've been a judge on the Shorty Awards, which I like to say honor excellence--such as it is--in social media. My fellow judges and I (see the list; the teenage version of me would have been delighted to be on a list with MC Hammer and Alyssa Milano) are sifting through the nominations right now, ahead of the March 26 ceremony in New York City (see info on tickets and free live Webcast).

The awards are the brainchild of Greg Galant (@gregory) and Lee Semel (@semel), who also created MuckRack, the best guide for finding journalists on Twitter (here's the CNET News list--hope you are following many/all of the folks there).

I've been handing out their Short Tweet Guide to hundreds of folks as a way to get people to use Twitter in smarter ways. Now, they've kindly given me my own version of their card. It's a business-card-sized guide on glossy paper that you can put in your wallet or purse. If I see you in person, please ask me for one for yourself--or for a friend. If I don't meet you in person, you can print and make your own card. To see this in a bigger size and to embed it on your own site, please go to this page, filled with embed codes. That page is on Skitch, my favorite screenshot and annotation tool (Galant and I used it to edit the guide collaboratively and I used Skitch to annotate my post about the right way and wrong way to do hashtags on TV).

As with anything to do with social media, I already feel this guide, just days old, needs editing, so please help me improve it by posting comments below or e-mailing me, sreetips at sree.net.

One edit I would make to the card (apart from perhaps removing my Twitter profile photo) is adding a line about starting tweets with an @ sign at the start of a tweet. If you do so, it will only be seen by those who follow you and the person your are mentioning--usually a small subset of your followers. If that's not your intention then start your tweets with a word or even a period (".@sree is a lousy tweeter..."--without the period, only those who follow me and follow you would see it). I would therefore also change the first line under "@username message" from "public reply to a user" to "semi-public reply to a user," emphasizing that you are losing potential readers by tweeting that way. If all you meant to do was reply semi-publicly to another person, then that works fine, of course.

Meanwhile, my more detailed, constantly-updated Social Media Guide is over on Tumblr.

READERS: What are your must-know Twitter tips? Post your thoughts in the comments below, please, or via @Sree or via #sreetips on Twitter.