Bonnie Smalley has Internet bragging rights: She has been blocked by Twitter for hand-typing too many tweets in an hour. They thought she was a computer program made to spew spam.
Some of the most serious networkers use Seesmic Desktop to collect Tweets and organize them outside of their browsers, allowing the user to prioritize tasks.
Ms. Smalley, it turns out, is a 100 percent human customer service representative for Comcast. She is one of 10 representatives who reach out to customers through social networks, rather than waiting for them to find Comcast’s support site.
Known on Twitter as comcast bonnie, Ms. Smalley reads at least 400 customer tweets on a slow day at her desk in Philadelphia. Amazingly, she replies to all of them, and an additional hundred or more e-mail messages and a few more messages on Facebook, MySpace, Second Life and LinkedIn. On days when Comcast makes an announcement, the volume of everything triples.
How does she do it? Ms. Smalley, 24, has plenty of advice to give, as do other always-on pros and amateurs. Their tips will help you minimize your time and effort while maximizing your social bliss.
Install a Console Application
Doing your social networking inside a browser window is slow, clumsy and prone to losing work in crashes. That is why serious networkers usually install a console application like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop.
There is a small war on the Internet over which of these two consoles is the best. The truth is, they both do a lot of the same things. Pick one. What matters is that they are much faster and less crash-prone than loading Facebook and Twitter into your browser. Also, replies and comments appear almost instantaneously, but in a separate, lightweight application instead of your browser. You can ignore the updates until it is time to pay attention.
Ms. Smalley organizes her Seesmic desktop by putting the busiest parts of the interface on the left, where she found she could read them faster. She then sorts the other components by how busy they are, parking the most idle of the Seesmic Desktop’s windows on the right, where she can ignore them most of the time.
Pick a Good Avatar
Nearly every social site now lets you upload a photo or other image to serve as your bio photo and as an indentifying thumbnail image next to posts, tweets and comments you write. Besides letting you show a bit of yourself to your readers, avatars make your writings easier to spot and harder to confuse with someone else’s work. Before you get sucked into typing, set up an avatar image that you can upload wherever you go.
“When I started with the team, I had just the Comcast C as my icon,” Ms. Smalley said by phone from her home in Delaware. “This doesn’t tell people I’m a real person.” She soon replaced the corporate logo with a smiling self-portrait and a goofy background image packed with cartoon characters. By appearing as real, individual and approachable, she has prompted customers to share their problems and frustrations with her. “People tweet me all the time about nonwork things,” she said.
If you are not keen on having a real photo of yourself up there, try the cartoon avatar generators at “The Simpsons Movie” Web site (Simpsons characters); Joystiq (Nintendo Wii style); South Park Studios (characters from Comedy Central’s bad-taste hit); and BeFunky, which lets you stylize a photo and then save it directly to your accounts on several networks.
Ms. Smalley warns, though: don’t change your avatar too often. It’s fun for you, but your growing crop of readers will be confused.
Know When to Keep It Private
Ariana Evans, known as faery queen21 on Twitter, is an administrator in the office of a small company near Pasadena, Calif. When she discovered Twitter, Ms. Evans recognized it as an oversharer’s paradise. But worrying about who might see what took time away from tweeting at full tilt.
Ms. Evans’s solution was to protect her Twitter updates. The option restricts her updates to only users who request access and whom Ms. Evans personally approves. (It is in the settings screen on Twitter.) In her walled garden, she feels she can say what she wants.
Be warned, though: Twitter makes it cut-and-paste simple for friends to accidentally retweet your protected updates into the public stream. Social networks are built by techies eager to share text, pictures and videos, not lock them up.
Take Notes
Once you get sucked into a marathon networking binge, you’ll probably never remember all the newly discovered Web sites you want to go back and try later. To memorize those, Twitter has a bookmarking function that few can find. Roll over a tweet you want to save and a star-shaped icon appears to its right. It’s faint, but it’s there. Click the star. Now click the Favorites link in the right-hand column of your Twitter homepage. The tweet that you starred, to use the vernacular, should be there.
Ms. Smalley keeps a separate notepad window open next to Seesmic, with a list of customers she is actively helping with a problem. “It keeps their phone number handy if they come back to ask a question,” she wrote. “It lets me see how long I’ve been helping them. It’s not fancy, but it does the job. I learned early on that it’s impossible to remember everything, even if you do write it down.”
Don’t Let the Web Rule You
The biggest problem with social networks is they are always on, 24 hours a day. Setting up efficient social networking habits may make you even more addicted to the constant contact.
Pete Cashmore edits Mashable, a blog about Internet businesses that draws millions of readers every month. Yet he is as vulnerable as anyone else to the siren call of the Internet when he sits down to work. Rather than learning to manage time, Mr. Cashmore suggests a Firefox add-on called LeechBlock.
“Use it to ban distracting sites like YouTube and Facebook between certain hours,” he says, “so you’re forced to get on with your work.”
Ms. Smalley, who cannot turn off Twitter at the office, sets a cutoff time for networking and lets her customers know when she will be unavailable. Returning to their problems the next morning, she found, works better than staying up late. “Twitter never sleeps,” she said to me in an e-mail message at 11:37 p.m. “But you need to.”
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