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Gary Vaynerchuk recently posted a couple of videos giving first Britanny Spears, then Barack Obama a hard time for how they are managing their twitter accounts. As always Gary has some great points, this guy owns the social space.

I completely agree – if Barack or Britanny are trying to own the space.

But what if they are just trying to provide another avenue for info about what they are up to. Isn’t that was twitter was started for? “What are you doing?” is the question, right?

Everything has its purpose. I follow a few news feedcasting twitterers because I like to get the news updates sprinkled in there. I actually don’t want a relationship, just straight news. So sometimes, having that info in twitter form is useful.

Read on…

NB: I hope that this doesn’t lead to an uptick of this type of twitter spam. But I think educating the non-spammers is more important.

Ok, I thought I’d write a new bloggeries about using social engineering to game twitter. Let’s start to covering some basics that many of you know. The best people to follow on twitter often have more followers than those they are following.

It’s basic economics, unless you’re a superstar like @WayneSutton or @GaryVee, you just can’t handle all the noise it generates. Even though reciprocation is the nice thing to do, I can understand when a big name doesn’t follow me. This leads to easily identifiable patterns, spammers are often following 1000s of people and have followers numbering in the 10s or low 100s. When I get followed by one of these chaps I quickly block them. Update:@EmailKarma pointed out that I should just go with d spam @spammer.

Find out what the spammers are doing…

Good products serve a need and serve it well. A crucial piece of solving problems is good workflow. And to truly have good workflow you need to understand the entire environment people are experiencing during and around the time of the problem you are addressing.

Lately I’ve been spending a good bit of time trying to think through the workflow for idek.net as well as twitwit.us. These two sites integrate with other services, and as such, I need to consider where people will be and what they’ll be doing when the use these apps.

Why do you care? Well, you always need to remember to attack every problem from multiple angles, because your users aren’t just coming at it from one place. They may have different goals and different needs that you may not have considered.

Once you’ve gotten all the variables better understood you can try to devise a workflow and solution that will efficient and enjoyable for your users.

I pulled together a quick primer for twitter over the weekend. It all came from a few tweets that I saw @TheRab make for some new comers that were following him. I figured that a Twitter Howto was due.

Check out HowTo Twitter

Please feel free to drop me a comment with anything that you think it missing. This is meant to to be a primer, not a complete walk through of everything twitter.