OK, Twitter For Dummies should be called Twitter for Everyone. I may be considered a pretty heavy Twitter user and was #herebeforeoprah but even I really enjoyed getting into the heads of Laura @pistachio Fitton, Michael @gruen Gruen, and Leslie @geechee_girl Poston.

If I were to boil Twitter for Dummies down, I would say that you can't dumb down Laura, Michael or Leslie — they're leaders in Twitterville and you really cannot be disappointed if you grab the book.

For me, the entire book only took me the length of a Hollywood movie to read; however, they threw in kitchen sink in this book, extending into rarely used features such as the Public Timeline and really geeky command-line access to Twitter such as "d chrisabraham" or "follow chrisabraham," etc.

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If you're smart and savvy but have not yet been wooed to the world of Twitter, All a Twitter is for you: All a Twitter: A Personal and Professional Guide to Social Networking with Twitter.

Author Tee Morris writes this book more to the folks who are not quite wooed by Twitter yet but who are twi-curious. The first half of the book is boring but addresses all of the questions of the what, when, where, and how of Twitter.

The second half of the book is not only interesting but has Tee written all over it and offers up the who and the why with quite a dose of subjective opinion, which I find very attractive since too many of these Twitter books don't come from a place of the personal testimonial.

While the first half may be boring, it is super-useful, taking you by the hand and showing you through all of the steps required to wade into Twitter fully outfitted, including help with my Android G1 phone (something sorely lacking in Twitter for Dummies).

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Spent Friday at Seizing the Moment, the sold-out, end-of-summer Garage/Summer Institute at San Francisco State University featuring a rich array of speakers who provided training in multimedia, new media, social media and more. I gave a 90-minute Social Media Bootcamp with Susan Mernit, and I'll post the presentation on Monday.

Above is Benjamin Jealous, president of the NAACP, whose talk ended the conference. (I enjoyed meeting him and admire his work.) Here's an 11-picture photo set of Seizing the Moment.

New study doesn't distinguish between flaws and healthy behavior

I've long believed that the Internet exists solely because of our ego. Everything we do publicly online is an effort to be acknowledged. This week, two stories pointed out the frighteningly obvious: That students who use social networks are narcissistic and that a center for Internet addiction has opened up in Washington.

Please researchers, enough with the leading questions

The first story should be filed under the category of "Trees are made of wood and other stuff we already knew that didn't require the expense of a university's resources." Regardless, bringing up the issue of what motivates students to use social networks makes us all realize why we're using the Internet. And that's to be acknowledged and to get recognized. The problem is the study lumped in divergent traits - narcissism, self-promotion, and attention-seeking - as being synonymous. Self-promotion and narcissism are two very different things. Nobody seeks or admires someone who is narcissistic, but we admire people who effectively and non-offensively self-promote.

The study created many leading questions which has been a chronic irritation I've had with organizations such as Forrester and IDC that conduct social media research (Read "Social media research is chock full of leading questions"). In my critique, IDC asked leading questions as to what advertising people would be willing to see online and Forrester asked leading questions about trusting corporate blogs. No one "wants" to see ads and the brand of "corporate blogs" is like that of a "used car salesman." No one wants either, but we use both.

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Shel Israel discusses the impact of the real-time Web on society & business

Shel Israel's new book, Twitterville, is due to hit hit bookstores next week. (See Twitterville site, the Global Neighbourhoods blog or Amazon page.) A day after his book release party at the Hiller Aviation Museum, San Carlos, Calif., Shel took time out to answer five questions from Socialmedia.biz.

1In the early stages of your book research you were focusing on the conversational Web. Why did you zero in on Twitter?

Shel Israel: When you and I talked about the conversational web, I was still exploring new book possibilities. I wanted a story that was an obvious evolutionary step from Naked Conversations.

My focus narrowed and locked in April 2008, when James Buck tweeted the word "arrested" on his Blackberry as he was being taken off to possibly rot in an Egyptian jail. A day later, when he posted a second word, "freed," I realized that something was happening on Twitter that exceeded what I originally thought was there. In another couple of weeks I started seeing a very broad story that also went quite deep. I felt passionate about it and became convinced that Twitter was about to have a very significant impact on the Conversational Web.

2At the 140 Character conference, some speakers suggested that the real-time Web was as momentous as the birth of the original Web. Do you agree? How do you see Twitter's potential impact on culture and society?

Shel Israel: I'm not very good at "most momentous" type judgments until I can look back at an event with some historical perspective. I regard the birth of the real time web as a more recent point on a continuum that started back when our ancestors were grunting and gesturing around the cave fires telling stories about the hunt; using blood and berries to tell stories on cave walls. The birth of the web is a really big dot in that continuum. It is the moment when our communications transcended tangible spaces and allowed email and other interactive activities. How big a dot is the real time web? I think it's huge, but we are still in nascent times. I may be optimistic, but we need to be able to look back further to see how it impacts human interactivity.

3Can you cite some best practices about how companies are using Twitter?

Shel Israel: The term "best practices" traditionally historically refers to refined, redundant, measurable activities that can become the stadard of business protocols. I think we are still in an early phase where nothing is yet a best practice, but merely a really good idea.

There's a general consensus that social media has been a communications game changer. Most people think it is a good idea to be transparent and not deceptive; to listen at least as much as you speak; to show a human face rather than a brand image; to build reputation by being generous to a community rather than making noise and to generally tell more than you sell.

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The Society for New Communications Research solicited capsule summaries of corporate blogging best practices offered by some of its members, who are among the top social media consultants in the country.

Shel Israel
Author, Twitterville, co-author, Naked Conversations

Humanize: Remember that one fundamental reason for blogging is the humanization of the corporation. Be a real person when you blog. Show yourself doing a job that you have some passion for. Show your fallibility and, above all, do not fall into the trap of mediocrity, where so many corporate blogs wind up.

Serve your reader more than your employer: This is a success strategy. The more generous you are to your readers, the more influential you will be. Send people away from your site through links to competitors when appropriate. You may lose the sale, but in the long run you will gain a loyal customer.

Join conversations before you start new ones: People are already talking about the issues they care the most about. Read what they have to say and add value to the existing conversation. Then when you start a new conversation, you will already have credibility and trust. If you try to initiate a conversation and people don’t know who you are or where you are coming from, then they will either ignore you or mistrust you.

John Cass
Author, Strategies and Tools for Corporate Blogging

Commenting: Corporate blogging is not just about the content on your site, it’s also about participating in conversations on other blogs. Respond to comments on your blog, and also comment on other blogs. These conversations can be just as important as building relationships with people on your own site and establishing your reputation in your community.

Tracking conversations: Tracking conversations on other blogs is one of the most difficult aspects of blogging. Fortunately there are now technologies that enable you to track conversations. These include coComment, delicious, Co.mments and Commentful.

Personalization: Personalization is important in writing a blog, as blogs provide employees the chance to break down some of the barriers that exist between customers and companies. The informal style of writing that is possible in a blog can help reach customers who would not pay attention to a company’s statements otherwise.

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This week I attended one of the more interesting discussions around brands' use of social media that I've taken in during the past year.

Your Brand, Their World at Razorfish's corporate headquarters in San Francisco brought together a highly engaged audience of 100 social media and marketing specialists during an opening presentation by Garrick Schmitt, GVP Experience Planning for Razorfish (@gschmitt on Twitter) followed by an interesting panel with Megan O’Connor, Levi’s; Michael Brito, Intel; Marisa Gallagher, Razorfish; Sam Faillace, Shutterfly, and Jon Swartz, USA Today (moderator).

"We're all intuitively going through these changes and we're all intuitively interacting with [brands and media companies] in different ways without fully understanding what it all means," Schmitt said.

Slide highlights: social media spending

• Schmitt offered metrics to back up the excitement around the explosion of interest in social media. For instance, in slide 3 of the deck above, you'll see that in Interactive marketing spending (US), search marketing and display advertising far surpass email marketing, social media and mobile marketing social media in terms of dollars spent today. Social media spending will grow from $716 million this year to $3.113 billion by 2014, according to Forrester's projection.

• Advertising dollars haven't followed the audience's migration online yet — but it will. Americans spend about an equal amount of time watching TV and going online today, but ad spending remains at 31 percent for television vs. only 12 percent for the online medium. (slide 5)

• Bad news for newspapers: Individuals spend 7 percent of their media consumption with print newspapers but the ad spend for newspapers is 14 percent today.

• You'll find richly textured analysis of the trends in social influence marketing in Razorfish's recent fluent publication (free download).

Panel highlights: rock stars and the 80-20 Rule

• I love those new Intel commercials ("Our rock stars aren't like your rock stars") on PBS's NewsHour and elsewhere, especially the ones featuring Ajay Bhatt, one of the inventors of the USB. I guessed that it wasn't really him (Wikipedia is silent on his age), but thought those were real Intel employees. However, it's an actor playing Bhatt, Michael Brito said, and indeed, all the employees portrayed in the ads are actors.

• Brito (@Britopian on Twitter) uses the 80-20 Rule in his tweeting: 80 percent is personal, 20 percent is business — an excellent frame of reference for companies just jumping into the game. He talked about the importance of reaching out to the community "in an authentic manner" through their social media efforts, such as the Intel Insiders (disclosure: I'm part of that team). "I'd rather have 100 people I have an authentic relationship than 5,000 followers" and an artificial relationship or no real nexus to you or your brand.

• "Social media is not the be all and end all," Brito added. "Not every company needs a Twitter account or a Facebook app."

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Here's a slightly revised version of the Social Networks: Engaging Users With News webinar I gave to a few hundred virtual attendees when I flew out to the Poynter Institute in Florida in May.

The slideshow offers eight different areas of social networking that news publishers — anyone from a single individual to a full newsroom — can leverage to engage people around news events in a more robust, interactive way. Specifically:

• Blue skies: new approaches to news
• Google Map mashups
• Instant social networks
• Geocoding and citizen photography
• The awesomeness of Twitter
• Widgets: tapping into local conversations
• Facebook & the news
• Community video

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Experience Project treats its members as individuals, not conditions

Feeling alone during a moment of crisis can compound the gravity of a situation. While it may not be possible for people to be physically by your side, social networks allow people to find you and communicate with you, making you feel less alone.

Sometimes you don’t want your friends to help you because you don’t want your friends to know your problems. That’s why we often divulge our darkest concerns to therapists and psychiatrists. Beyond having the training to help us, they’re morally and professionally bound to not repeat anything you say to them.

Problem is professional therapy costs money. But anonymous social networks don’t.

Experience Project (EP) is a unique social network in that it promotes anonymity. Most social networks focus on promoting yourself as a brand and connecting you to your friends by name. EP members are anonymous and are able to connect through each other’s stories. EP is not the first anonymous social network. It’s just the first one I know of that doesn’t have a predefined agenda. With other social networks joining them automatically identifies you as a rape survivor, someone suffering from MS, or some other ailment or a physical/emotional tragedy. While these social networks are all valid and helpful, people are first seen by their issue or ailment. It's hard to break out of that image and when you overcome that issue, then there's no reason to be on that specific social network.

I spoke to many members of Experience Project to learn how they came upon discovering EP and how the anonymous social network helped them cope with their concerns.

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