But I still kept hearing the whole “but does it make money” line from above. Finally, I can answer them with a resounding, “Yes. Lots!”

A little while back I wrote about my dilemma of whether to push Facebook or Twitter as a means for advertisers to post their specials and deals. We were about to embark on a new venture to help advertisers use social media as a marketing tool. We had no idea if it would go over very well or if the advertisers would “get it” or if we were just wishful thinking.

Well, so far we’ve signed up 14 15 businesses – a healthy mix of small and large, one-man operations and corporations – to our giNetwork, and those alone will net over 15k this year. And we’re going for more because we’ve learned businesses are hungry for this and I think we’ve hit on the right method for getting them going. I wanted to share this success and outline how it works.

The first lesson we learned is that selling social media on its own around here doesn’t work. They either don’t understand it or say they don’t have time for it. So we bundled it with our local business search product called FindNEthing.  Many newspapers, large and small already have a similar product – a marketplace or yellow pages type of program that they could use as well.

To be a part of FindNEthing, businesses “claim” their page for $79 per month. Now, for $20 more, we’ll add them to our giNetwork which gives them the following:

• A Twitter account
• A Facebook Fanpage
• Inclusion in the giNetwork widget on the front page of our widely read newspaper website at theindependent.com.
• Added to the giNetwork directory page as well.

How does that work on the back end? It’s a lot of work, initially but the key point is that we take away that first hurdle of setting up the Facebook fanpage and Twitter account for them. We remove the hurdle and then we come out to their shop and take the time to show them how to use it.

So, once the business agrees to go for it, I set up their Facebook/Twitter accounts by starting a gmail address for the business and use that for the signup on Facebook and Twitter. I have the business tell me a name to use for Facebook (because it requires a real name) and go from there.

Once the accounts are ready, I use our @giNetwork twitter account and add them to a Twitter list. We have created a Twitter widget (using Twitter’s own widget code) for that list and that is what feeds onto our website and the special directory page we have created for this. We manipulated the Twitter widget code to suit our page design, but that’s not necessary really.

As for the Twitter/FB dilemma, initially, I set it up so that if the client prefers to use Facebook, I just link their fan page to their Twitter account using Facebook’s functionality. And if they prefer to use Twitter, I use a Facebook app called ‘Smart Twitter for Pages‘ to link Twitter to the fan page. Once the client has decided what they like best, I switch one of those off so there’s no double posting. I’ve also been creating custom Twitter backgrounds and avatars etc. for each business. Not really necessary but kind of a nice touch.

Once they’re hooked up and ready to tweet, I go out to visit the business, give them all their login info and walk them through everything. The time spent with them varies by how savvy the business owners are – some copped on straight away, some…. didn’t. But an extra benefit to this is that in addition to the nice revenue for us, we’re building a genuine, helpful rapport with our advertisers, big and small. And we love it.

We will also be emailing each advertiser periodic tips and tricks to help them discover the best practices for their venture online and we’ll also do our best to grow their fans and followers. We believe we are perfectly suited for this because we can provide an audience for their deals with the widget on our front page as well as promote them in print and through our own Twitter accounts.

Successes so far:

• One business, a local flower shop, decided to try using the code word tactic in their posts. “Stop in and say “I love my dog” and get this plant for $1.00″. The day after she did that, she told us she had four new customers in using the code word that had never shopped her store before. They said they saw it on our front page.
• Another business – a local and popular Mexican place – offered free entrees to five random Facebook fans if they got to 500 fans by May 1st. While they fell short by about 14 fans by their deadline, they still got 486 new fans in less than a week.
• A salon plans to share before and after photos while a woman who runs a small shop for teachers (and can only open her store when she’s not substitute teaching) is using her tweets to let her customers know when she’s open and when she’s not – by sending them to our website to check. Woohoo traffic!
• I was messaged on Facebook by someone who worked for a small computer company who had been seeing mentions of the giNetwork from other local businesses and they asked me how to get on board.

Finally, our goal is to, of course, add more businesses to the network and at the rate it’s going, it shouldn’t be a problem. We’re learning a LOT as we go and we’ve made sure to be flexible for each business, tried not to make the consultation/teaching part of this too complicated by understanding how “savvy” each business is.

I’m excited to be teaching them how simple it actually is. I just have to remember not to bombard them with all the cool things you can do once you get into some of the third-party stuff. We keep them on the web and if they want to learn more than that, we’ll show them, but it’s best to stay basic. It’s been simply amazing.

And finally, the higher-ups can stop asking us, “But how does it make money?”

Along comes your ad rep from your local newspaper and he/she has something new to offer you outside of the usual banner ads and 3X5 print ads and corner peels and interstitials (inter-huh?). This time they mention something about helping you get on tools like Twitter and Facebook. And after they do that, they tell you that for a nominal monthly fee, your business will be in prime real estate, beachfront property on their very heavily-trafficked website (Yay, AP says I can type ‘website’ now! Oh wait, I’ve been doing that for years.)

Well hell, what a deal! Sign me up!

Okay, now imagine you are me. You’re @stephromanski (I’m testing the WP plugin for @anywhere there, sorry) and you’ve begun getting these businesses set up on Twitter and Facebook. Once they’re good to go, the business person will be in charge of their own destiny there and they can tweet and/or post status updates as much as they want.

But here is your minor dilemma: You know they’ll mainly be using one of those tools, either Facebook or Twitter. So if they choose to use Facebook for all their updating, you have to feed those updates to their Twitter account so that those tweets will populate your advertiser Twitter List widget that sits on the prime beachfront property. BUT if they predominantly use Twitter to update, you have to rely on a dodgy Facebook app that sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t for feeding tweets to their Facebook fanpage.

Which is the better option for the businessperson who is usually too busy and may not fully “get” how to use the tools? Which way would be easier for them?

The argument for having them use Facebook is that they are already likely to have a personal Facebook page and perhaps they sort of know their way around it whereas Twitter is completely foreign to them. I know @ev addressed Twitter’s usability at their Chirp conference and I found myself nodding furiously at that whole section of his speech.

On the other hand, if the advertiser is not on either tool, which is the best way to guide them? Fanpages are kind of a bitch to work with, IMO. It seems like it would be harder to teach them (oh yes, in addition to setting them up, you must then spend an hour or so with them and teach them how to use it) to get to and update the fanpage then it would be to teach them to open up Tweetdeck where they can handle everything.

Is it six of one, half dozen of the other? Do you tackle each advertiser individually,  gauge their needs and guide them accordingly? Do you set up a system of ‘This is how you’re going to do it’ to save time?

These are the questions flying around my head right now. Any input in the comments would be greatly appreciated

When I walked into the newsroom this morning, the publisher was talking to the city editor and our temporary mobile journalist about a call he’d gotten from a local high school. His son attends the school and they were informing parents about an apparent shooting threat. They told parents they could keep their kids at home or come pick them up if they had already been dropped off. Heavily armed police officers were guarding the school and calls were starting to come into the newsroom from panicked parents.

Since we are on Day Three of our live tweeting experiment, our intrepid journo with the Droid headed up to the school to see what he could find out. As soon as he arrived, the information started flowing right onto our front page. And it was an awesome sight to behold. He was able to get in and speak to the plethora of parents who had arrived to pick up their kids and find out more information from the police and school officials.

The next thing I know, I’m getting a flood of Facebook friend requests (our Twitter updates flow to our Facebook page) from people following the story on our website. When they held an impromptu press conference to assure parents their kids would be safe to come back to class, Jack used Qik on his Droid to send it live as it happened. When it ended, I was able to embed the video right into the full story another reporter wrote when all the excitement died down.

We were able to tweet – as the words “the suspect has been arrested” as the words were coming out of the Administrator’s mouth, flowing it to our site and thus making our leap into real time news. It was incredible to behold and the best part is the entire newsroom, from my usual ‘bah humbuggers’ to the ones who’ve embraced it, could finally see all of this in action.

I think it’s one thing to talk about the Hudson River landing and Twitter’s role there, or Twitter’s role with Haitian relief to these folks, but it’s simply not going to “sink in” until they can see it in action locally like they did this morning.

It’s been an awesome morning. I will stipulate that by also saying I am terribly glad nobody was hurt and that the threats never came to fruition. My daughter graduated from this very school only last year.

Yesterday, we held an impromptu meeting to discuss some issues with this experiment and to see what could be improved. Some lessons from that – and from this morning are below:

• How can we flow images and video to our own site instead of sending traffic away to Twitpic or Qik? – It can be done, but it’s clunkier than simply using the tools built into apps like Twidroid or Tweetie. I think we’d have to build an app from the ground up, which is beyond our ken. And Barbie.
• Will a non-Twitter user understand how to disseminate the information we are sending into our Juitter extension? Does it become confusing to follow when the latest tweets are on top? – I think today proved that this really isn’t an issue. I have yet to hear from anyone who was glued to our coverage today complain about the order in which tweets arrived.
• Reign in the ‘casual observations’ such as “I’m moving on someplace else” or “Bob left the room”. – When reporting news on our front page, we should keep it to the news and leave off the ambiance a little. This is fine for regular tweeting, but maybe not so much on our front page. I haven’t decided whether I agree with this yet. Still pondering.
• In today’s big news story, when reporting real-time, avoid phrases like “I’m hearing that ….” and reporting rumors. – I’m of two minds on this. I can see that a newspaper reporting ‘I spoke to a lady who says her kids tell her students carry guns to school’ might give credence to false information. On the other hand, one of our reporters said that when you’re reporting live on the scene, the rumors become part of the story. I can see that. I think it’s a very fine line, though, between ‘just the facts’ and reporting the mood and observations of a scene like that.

What do you think?

Not like this.

We had the crazy idea to spend 8 hours a day (barring travel time) each weekday traveling around the town an tweeting what’s happening right now in Grand Island. From pothole repairs in the cold to a trailer fire, our Presentation editor, Jack Sheard,  (also known as the only guy in the office with a smartphone – a Verizon Droid to be exact) will go out and about either with a reporter or photographer, or on his own and cover our town.

And we will feed those tweets into a beachfront spot on the front page of our website

Today is Day One.

What have we learned so far?

• That Yahoo Pipes don’t like it if you send them too many search queries, so we had to remove the twitpic feed.
• That the Twitter account we wanted to use for this, @GIRightNow, won’t feed into Juitter properly and we have no idea why. So Jack is using his own account for this, which works perfectly fine. Go figure. It’s probably some API annoyance with @GIRightNow being a new account or something silly like that.
• That we have “dead air” so to speak while Jack is driving. Although, it seems like dead air to us because we’re watching this closely, but it probably doesn’t to the average, casual reader stopping by the page. Even so, we’re going to use the dead time to point folks to parts of our website that they might not have known existed.
• That filling 8 hours a day in our small-ish city might be quite a task

There will be more lessons learned I am sure and I’ll either update this post or start a new one with those as we go. Here are some questions we’ve had about this experiment:

What’s the point of it? A new way to create stickiness on the website and drive pageviews (we hope).

What happens when the two weeks are up? We hope to show the value of Twitter for our readers and to our newsroom (and possible advertisers) by being able to get the news (the important stuff and the casual ‘why are they fixing potholes in the Winter’ stuff) to our readers and further brand us as the go-to source for local news and information. After we see how this experiment goes, we may decide to find a permanent spot on the website for the latest tweets and incorporate more news that may not make it online or into print there from all of our reporters.

How can you spare the time to do this? We just had to make the time, cover shifts and work as the awesome team we all are to be able to do this. We feel it’s important to experiment. It’s better to try and fail than not try at all. Most of all, we want to improve our readers’ experience when they visit our website.

Keep an eye on us. We’re doing good things.

On with the list.

Tools I can’t live without:

Twitter. Obviously. Not only the service itself, but the huge assortment of third-party apps you can use with Twitter to really maximize its usefulness. Services like AudioBoo, Twitpic, Twitvid, and now Post.ly (which is quickly becoming my favorite) really make the Twitter experience – and the social experience – rich and satisfying.

I’ll break down these services:

AudioBoo: Simply the best option for posting brief audio clips online. Think of it as a micro-podcast. Uses include breaking news alerts, quick interviews, movie reviews, How-to tips (any kind of tips really), event coverage… the list goes on. Take a look at their Featured Boos to get a good idea of how folks are using it. The beauty of it is how easy they let you embed and share your Boos – if you can share or embed a YouTube video, you can share or embed a Boo.

You can Boo via their gorgeous iPhone app (it works just as well with an iPod Touch, but you’ll need Apple’s headphones/mic combo to do so.); You can upload or record a Boo right from your PC, and they now offer an app for the Droid as well (from reading the user reviews there, the app may need some tweaking still.) I love AudioBoo.

TwitPic: This service is a bit more subjective, depending on what you’ve got for a cell phone. Those of you with a spiffy smartphone have a lot of photo options such as YFrog or Tweetphoto. Personally, I hate YFrog because of its slow loading times, sometimes photos don’t load, and the site is too “busy” for my tastes.

For my part, I adore TwitPic. It works with any phone that takes photos, is as easy as emailing to a special address, and can handle large bandwidth loads well these days. I have a Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go phone. I’d love a Droid or iPhone, but right now, both are cost-prohibitive for me. But, my little Virgin phone has served me well. I’ve used it extensively on vacations, for everyday ‘OMG look at all the snow!’ pictures, and I’ve done a little reporting for the paper with it.

Twitvid: I cannot get over how simple it has become to get video out there so quickly. Twitvid is just one of a number of excellent services out there, such as Qik and 12Seconds and Posterous (more on Posterous in a bit). Twitvid happens to be easiest for me to use because again, I don’t have a spiffy-cool smartphone. For those of you lucky people who do, Qik is awesome because you can also freaking STREAM VIDEO right from your phone. How cool is that?

But I use my trusty Flip Ultra, and upload to Twitvid as soon as I’m back at my computer and bingbangboom it’s uploaded and out there. The website allows you to post from your camera, from your phone, you can email it, or record from a webcam, and the ability to share the videos across multiple platforms is a plus.

Cover It Live: I cannot say enough wonderful things about Cover it Live. I’ve had so much fun with this amazing software for a long time now and tried many different ways to make it useful for my paper. It’s perfect for covering breaking stories, interviews, debates, live events (similar to radio doing ‘remotes’ on location), Q&A’s, and really just look at their site for more examples.

My newspaper’s owners require us to moderate the hell out of everything which can be a huge hindrance. But Cover It Live makes this dead easy without making people feel like they’re being moderated. The producer sees each comment before it ‘goes live’ and can choose whether or not to let it through. If a participant is trusted, the producer can allow them to comment unmoderated.

Cover It Live has so many features that will rock your socks. Feed in Twitter updates via user or hashtag, stream live video, you can drop ads in, upload photos into the chat, polls, a newsflash/scoreboard feature, replays, live editing (to fix all those pesky typos on the fly), and so much more. Here is the full feature list. Seriously, if I had to recommend one service (apart from Twitter ) it would be Cover it Live.

Posterous: This website is really amazing. As of today (January 21st, 2010) it has gotten even better with a new edition that I will talk about in just a moment. First, Posterous makes posting a blog, a video, an audio clip, or pictures so simple my grandmother could do it. Ok, maybe not my grandmother because she’s never touched a computer, but really, any technophobe would be able to handle this. All they need to know how to do is send an email with attachments.

That’s the beauty of Posterous. It magically takes your email attachments, be they audio, video or JPGs or just plain old text and turns them into slick blog posts which you can then share across a whole slew of popular platforms.

For a newsroom, Posterous is turning out to be an ideal way to gather user-generated content from your readers. By giving them a special email address associated with your paper’s Posterous site, readers can simply email you their bad weather/cutest puppy/sports photos and videos. You have full moderation control as well. The only drawback I have found with Posterous so far is that because it’s email, be prepared to deal with spam.

Today, Posterous announced the addition of Post.ly which lets you easily upload and tweet your multimedia stuff. Fantastico!

Facebook: Ahhh Facebook. Forget MySpace. Blech. A lot of people have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. But for the purposes of a newspaper, it’s a good idea to be where your readers are no matter what the platform is.

Send your paper’s Twitter updates to Facebook. Let people share photos, videos, or links with you there. Join in on any comment threads that get started. Just like Twitter, the most important thing you can do is interact with your fans/friends/readers.

Don’t have anyone you can spare to manage your Social Media aspect for the paper? Spread it out among the staff. But this is important – don’t neglect it or ignore it if you don’t understand it. It will only hurt you in the end.

Tools that would rock in the newsroom:

A smartphone of some kind: I think every newsroom should equip their staff with an iPhone/Droid/Nexus. One of my coworkers just got a Droid (iPhones are not available in our area) and we’re both convinced that it is the single greatest tool a journalist could have.

As it is right now, I’ve got to carry my Flip, my cell phone and my iPod Touch which normally isn’t a big deal, but as I discovered on a vacation last year, juggling all of that while trying to capture a moment is hard. One phone to rule them all, I say!

Publish2: One of the best ways to collaborate with fellow journalists and aggregate links and stories for your readers. It’s a wonderful tool that I’m having trouble getting my newsroom interested in.

Just take a look at the sheer number of journalists you can collaborate with: P2 Directory

Some of the tools you get access to include a fabulous Wordpress plugin, a browser bookmarklet to make sharing easier, widgets, and access to the Publish2 Ning network where you can bounce ideas, ask for help, share your own knowledge with so many journalists it’s not even funny.

Tools I wish I had access to:

iSites: Newspapers need to get on the ball with a decent smartphone app. I know the bigger newspapers have either paid a developer or have one in-house that can create gorgeous apps. I am jealous of them. But for smaller market papers who do not have that kind of budget, iSites feels like a decent solution. There are similar sites, such as DoApps.com, but after sifting through their blog I could find no pricing information whatsoever. That tells me it’s likely very expensive (and if not, why not post your pricing in a visible spot?)

iSites will create an iPhone  app, and beginning in early February according to their excellent live support person, a Droid app right away, and take care of the submission headaches for you. For a flat fee of $25, You get a lovely app fed by your RSS feeds. You can categorize by feed and if you wish to monetize it, you can pay a reasonable $99 per year fee and include AdMob in your App. I really like this solution and I’m hoping to get it approved for my newspaper.

Let me know in the comments what tools you love, what tools you wish you could use, and which ones would rock your newsroom!

If you’ve got half an hour to kill, have a listen!

So, Nebraska and surrounding states were hit by a rather large snowstorm this week and because we had some warning it was coming, we planned some awesome online coverage.

I set up a live webcam using Ustream.tv that simply pointed out our front window onto part of downtown Grand Island and called it our SnowCam. It was on before the storm hit, during the storm, and is proving so popular with viewers from around the world (who turned out to be from the area. The farthest away I heard was a local’s daughter in Germany who enjoyed the cam) that I haven’t shut it off yet. To date, we’ve had over 10,000 viewers and UStream kindly featured us on their front page. Woohoo!

We also had a couple of guys who cam and had a little snowball fight in front of the cam. I was forewarned about it (though I still do not know who they were) and so recorded it and it’s now our second most-viewed video (the top viewed video is of a dog. The dog is awesome and deserves the top spot.)

Next we put up the always-awesome Cover it Live window on our front page where we fielded questions about closings, road reports and  fed all of our Twitter streams with photos and video. We opened up the #nestorms tag to allow readers from around the state to feed into the CiL conversation and we kept the chat going all day. We opened it up again the next day (after the storm had passed and the plowing had begun) and Jack Sheard and Scott Kingsley (Our presentation editor and photographer, respectively) jumped in Jack’s 4WD and drove around town sending Twitpics and road reports into the chat so people could get an idea of what had and had not been cleared. They also stumbled onto a backhoe that was engulfed in flames and got some great shots of that.

I solicited reader photos using Posterous (Thanks and props go to the ever-ahead-of-the-curve folks at the Austin-Statesman) and we got a few cool photos there. I also shot some video using my Flip and TwitVid.com of a couple of drives during and after the storm and shared them in the CiL show.

We had a lot of fun and the stats freaks among us gleefully (and guilt-free!) watched as the SnowCam’s viewers steadily climbed, as our Day One Cover it Live show climbed to over 1,600 views and 390 replays (phenomenal for a small paper like us. To put that in perspective, we were over the moon when our Black Friday CiL coverage got 590 view, our best day ever, until now.) and our Day Two show reached over 700 views.

These are the numbers we needed to be able to show our advertisers that our online coverage of stuff is worth sponsoring, and hopefully that will start happening.

As many might know, the founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, is from Clarks, Nebraska – population: 361 give or take.

I’ve been a sort of casual “fan” of Evan’s since I began using Blogger when it was still a part of Pyra Labs and I learned the founder was from Nebby. I say “fan” with quotes because I didn’t, you know, follow his every business move, but I loved Blogger and I love Twitter and I think it’s neat that Evan’s involved in both and I think it’s even neater that he’s from Nebraska (in fact, it’s one of the ‘hooks’ I use to try and interest my newsroom into using Twitter).

As I passed through Clarks, it really struck me that someone could come from this tiny tiny place and be innovative and successful. Oh sure, there are many well-known people who have come from small towns to make it big and I applaud them all, but Clarks is close to home. It sounds cheesy as hell, I know, but I had a little moment of inspiration driving through this small farm town.

Recently it seems more that I’m following a handful of famous people who interest me and it basically acts like another facebook status news feed, except for people who are too famous to be my friends on FB. I’m quite happy to accept that I’m doing it wrong, but I don’t really know how to do it right.

So, I thought I’d write about how I use Twitter – personally. I’ve talked about it benefits my newspaper, and I’ve gone on and on about how it can be a marvelous tool for any business. But I guess I haven’t really talked about how it can be used for fun as well.

Bear in mind, not everyone’s going to use it the way I do. Not everyone’s going to ever see any benefit to Twitter. Twitter is what you make of it. That’s my mantra. Twitter is what you make of it. But here are some ideas of how to make something fun and/or beneficial for anyone.

First, I have a lot of Twitter accounts. I mean, I have more than what is probably normal:

• @UKMelia – My Twitter account that is all for me to do with and mold how I please. I follow only those who interest me (several celebs, fan accounts from books/movies/shows I like etc.), family, and friends there, as well as people I work with on the Buffy/Angel Between the Lines audio dramas I participate in. The majority of my tweets here are also mostly to my boyfriend and my daughter. I don’t follow a ton of people here and I don’t have a big follower list either but this account is tailored exactly to what I like. I also keep this account locked because I am not interested in huge follower/following counts, and I can tweet what I like.
• @stephromanski – This is my professional account. I follow hundreds of smart, savvy journalists and news sources, some social media folk (I’m a bit choosy when it comes to that. I tend to prefer Social Media folk who work in my field, not the Marketing “Guru” folk because I’m not interested much in that.) I learn a lot from the people I follow here and it has been incredibly beneficial to me for sharing ideas, has expanded my interests and allowed me to network and meet others who enjoy the stuff I enjoy at work. The reason I keep separate personal/professional accounts is that this account is the one where no one gives a crap what I had for breakfast but on my UK account, my best friend might want the recipe for my awesome French Toast.
• @CherryPop and @LiamTheZombie – These are character accounts for a book I’m trying to write. I’m using Twitter to expand the ‘verse my characters inhabit. The project waxes and wanes, but I’m gearing up for NaNoWriMo with these guys so there will be more activity soon.
• @Doodurls – My pride and joy. My boyfriend and I created a website that solicits people Doodles, via Twitter mostly, and we run this account and the site together. These days, I think it’s almost essential that every venture like this  should have a Twitter account and facebook fan page associated with it to help grow the audience.
• And then I have about 7 or 8 accounts for the paper that I manage.

When Twitter was still in the early stages, the idea for it was to allow a quick way for the cell phone generation to send quick messages to friends and family to stay connected, to allow them to answer the ‘What are you doing?’ question knowing only family and friends would be interested in that. Some people have turned their personal feeds into something humourous. They’ll post one-liners, or @shitmydadsays, or quirky observations. Some tweet inspirational messages. Some will actually tweet every minute detail of their lives not caring who wants to read that sort of thing. And believe it or not, there are people on Twitter who aren’t after huge follower numbers.

I’ll give an example of how I came to grok Twitter. Year and years ago I used to be an admin on a telnet MUD called The Chatting Zone. The admin had their own special channel to talk on and basically it became a place to spit out random thoughts in our heads. Anything from, “Good lord who told Posh Spice she should be wearing THAT outfit??” (Hey, I said this was years ago) to, “Well I’m about to cook spaghetti for dinner.” Lots of times even the most mundane, random stuff would become conversation starters. When Twitter came along, I immediately thought how similar it was to my old TCZ admin days and I discovered I kind of missed the random ramblings of my fellow admin.

It might be hard to not view Twitter as a stripped down version of the Facebook status updates. And for my commenter, Twitter might not ever be useful for him personally. I think, for personal accounts, it’s too subjective to say Twitter is superior to Facebook or vice versa. Twitter is what you make of it. Tailor your account to follow who interests you, throw in some friends and family, use trends and searches to jump into conversations that matter to you and you’ll meet more people.

And who knows, maybe you’ll care about what some of them had for breakfast.

I swear, if I see that line in one more article about the positives and/or negatives of Twitter, I will scream. It’s a classic example of what makes Twitter so hard to “sell” in my newsroom and my small community.

I attended a meeting recently with several community businessmen and women where I was there to give a ‘Twitter 101′ talk. The first thing they said when I finished touting the real-time benefits, powerful search bonus and the variety of ways it could benefit small businesses, was the oft-quoted cliché above. They couldn’t get beyond it and it almost makes me angry.

Here I am trying to convince my coworkers and folks in the community that Twitter is a good thing, that it will help them in so many unexpected ways. But the only thing many of them come back with is the fact that they believe it is useless and frivolous. No, useless and frivolous is playing Mafia Wars on Facebook on company time. To be fair, several of the journalists in my newsroom have come around and are doing fantastically well with Twitter. But some… aren’t (also, none of them are playing Mafia Wars on company time ).

If you’re a journalist, you can learn a metric ton of information from the hundreds of other journalists using the service. You can crowdsource on a breaking story and provide complete coverage quickly. You can enjoy the benefits of having your community guide you to new stories, resources, tips and ideas.

If you’re a businessperson, the benefits to be explored for you are plentiful. You can find out what your customers are saying about you. You can direct specials and ads at them without the blowback you might get from shoving a banner ad in their face because they *choose* to follow you and see what you have to say. You can publicize events quickly – so many good things.

Have pity on those of us in the trenches trying to get people on board with this new direction. I think we can all agree Twitter isn’t really about what you had for breakfast anymore. Twitter is what you make of it. So can we stop using that tired old cliché now? Pretty please?