Sheri Larsen’s Flying Cloud

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Tools
Here are the best tools (and lists of tools) for Twitter that I’ve uncovered over the last few weeks:

• Online Marketing Blog: Five New Twitter Tools You Should Know
• Web Strategy by Jeremiah: My Essential Twitter Tools
• ReadWriteWeb: How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients
• SearchRank: 7 Gadgets That Are Sure To Enhance the Twitter Experience
• Unclutterer: Uncluttering with Twitter - another list of tools
• Frantic Industries: All Twitter tools and mashups in one place
• Twitter 100 - view your followers at a glance - wish it showed which I was already following but it is interesting to see when was the last time each person lasted posted to Twitter.
• Twhirl - I recently switched from using Twitbin in Firefox to using Twril on the desktop. I find it much better for keeping up with my Twitter feed.
• Summize - search Twitter in realtime. Summize recommended by my Twitter community when I was looking for a better search tool.
• Tweet Scan - I’ve had pretty good luck setting up alerts in Tweetscan.
• Twitter Meter- let’s you query an index of all the words that have been sent to twitter since 11/6/2007 and then plot the number of times that word was used over time. Interesting and fun, but I’m not sure useful….

Following and Being Followed
I don’t post to Twitter that often (maybe a few times a week), but I my followers have grown from 15 to over 100 in the last few months. I follow almost everyone who follows me . I skip people who post primarily in languages other than English or who use Twitter only as tool or making product annoucements (I like to follow real people, thanks!).

• Follow me: http://twitter.com/shlarsen
• Technobabble 2.0: Top analyst twitters / micro-bloggers… updated - looking for experts to follow?
• Marketing Pilgrim: 200+ Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter - links to a tool on Seocracy.com to quickly follow all the gurus.
• Blog Herald: Gridjit,A Social Portal for Twitter

Twitter for the Enterprise
Some thought provoking posts on using Twitter as an enterprise tool. I use Twitter primarily as a work tool and find it great for:

1. competitive intelligence
2. keeping up with online marketing trends
3. (very few) corporate announcements - again I want to be a “real person” not a corporate shill, so I keep this to a minimum
4. tracking mentions of me and my company

• TechCrunch: End Of Speculation: The Real Twitter Usage Numbers - ever curious as to who is using Twitter? This post says 200,000 active users a week (up from 50,000 in April).
• Performancing: Twitter As Resource? - one person’s journey from skeptic to fan
• Text Technologies: Enterprise Twitter - the author’s thoughts for an enterprise version of Twitter with real-time short communications with collegues, real-time wide outreach with customers, a replacement for existing IM services, all existing outside the corporate firewall
• Fast Forward: Trends to Watch: Twitter in the Enterprise
• MarketingProfs: 7 Ways Marketers Can Use Twitter
• Online Marketing Blog: Guide to Twitter as a Tool for Marketing and PR
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