I am the Twitter magnet for Occupy Austin, so I help guide the team responsible for @OccupyAustin. I also use twitter to raise awareness about this blog, as a freelance professional for hire, and as a citizen journalist from events like Occupy Wall Street-related protests.
A few weeks ago I taught a Twitter class to a handful of people from the local Occupation. Big thanks to Judy for recording & editing.
The class had an accompanying handout which you can read on Google Docs.
Twitter Class Notes
For future iterations of this class, I want to do change the following:
- Since I taught this class I discovered the set command, which allows mobile users to set their profile and other important features without web access. I will add set to this class in the future.
- All people using Twitter primarily through SMS text messages should text set mentions all to 40404 to make sure they get everything people send to them.
- Expect to spend some time helping new people pick a username. Recommend that if they want something simple (like a first name or short nickname), its best to add a word like occupy, ows, a city name, etc. For example, @Nancy is undoubtedly taken, but what about @ATX_Nancy or @NancyOccupies?
- In future classes I would like to get people tweeting to each other, to build Twitter networks. After teaching, have class members follow each other and send some messages. Might be great to do this before a major action.
- I should play with the default iPhone Twitter ap so I can help others more.
