That is the enticing invitation that I received this morning from the people at Hubspot. You can download it as a PDF or listen to the interviews. A lot of redundancy but some very good tips. You will recognise many of the 60 contributors as they contain most of the really successful bloggers.

Excellent article which summarises what is known about Twitter use. It certainly confirms my limited experience – limited because I make little use of it. All my postings are tweeted and that is about it for me. There are now 190 million Twitter users around the world producing 65 million tweets each day. 19% of US internet users now say they use Twitter or a similar service to share updates about themselves—double the figure from the previous year.

Some of the findings which stood out for me:

Most tweets are babble

While not academic research, some insight into what people are talking about on Twitter comes from an analytics company who categorised 2,000 tweets collected over one week. They fell into six categories (similar percentages were found by Java et al., 2007):

1. Pointless babble: 41%

2. Conversational: 38%

3. Pass-along value: 9%

4. Self-promotion: 6%

5. Spam: 4%

6. News: 4%

20 per cent are ‘informers’, 80 per cent are ‘meformers’

* Informers: 20% shared information and replied to other users

* Meformers: 80% mostly sent out information about themselves.

Informers tended to have larger social networks, perhaps because they passed on more interesting things and weren’t talking about themselves all the time.  This split hints at the different ways that people use Twitter. It also suggests that the conversational aspects of Twitter may have been overstated. If 80% of users don’t reply to others then it’s not that social.

Trends are one-time and short-lived

Tweets on a particular topic rarely last longer than a week and usually no more than a few days. Most topics only trend once, then die, usually never to return. 85% of these trends are news-related.

10% of Twitter users contribute 90% of the tweets

The mood of the nation

Twitter has also been used to measure the mood of the nation. Alan Mislove and colleagues collected 300 million tweets from the US, analysed their emotional content, and produced a ‘mood of the nation‘ video. It shows how the emotional content of people’s tweets changes over the day (red is negative and green positive).

So – as I of course classify myself as an Informer I will now tweet this to my embarrassingly few followers!

Gosh thats not easy to say! Brilliant new app( big nod to Geek in Disguise). This will save you time, effort, money and probably help world peace. Well maybe not the world peace bit but I have been doing a bit of pruning lately of who I am connected to in my social networks. This is a quick and easy way to figure out who to hang on to and who to ditch. It may also encourage you to find some new thinkers who will encourage and inspire you……

A New York Times article highlights the fact that 98% of twitter users are within 6 degrees of separation from one another and the average number of degrees between users is only 4.67. Just as everyone in the world is thought to be connected to one another within six steps (and the  movie star  Kevin Bacon is linked to just about every other actor in the trivia game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”), data from the social media consulting firm Sysomos finds that the same holds true for Twitter users. Interestingly they quote research suggesting the average degrees of connection of Facebook users is 5.73.   Twitter’s high connectivity makes the site a lucrative web spot for marketers, who can reach large audiences with just a handful of retweets.

People in the UK might be a little surprised to discover the great social media, marketing and personal branding guru has just introduced an ‘unconference’ in Doncaster, Yorkshire, of all places. But the power of social media being what it is Chris met Rob Wilmot, the very enterprising Chairman of Doncaster College Board of Governors, through Twitter. Having now met Rob I can understand how Chris was unable to say ‘no’. Rob – for UK readers – was the guy who developed Freeserve. Need I say more. I had never experienced an ‘unconference’ before and found the concept fascinating and of course very democratic. No agenda. We were asked who wished to lead sessions or ask discussion questions on social media related topics then we opted which sessions to go to and then the event was summarised at the end of the day along with podcasts, videos and written reports. Chris kicked us off with a brilliant keynote summarising everything he had learned about social media in the past 11 years. Future postings will return to that but what I have posted here is his views on the changing nature of work in the US and his  answer to our question ‘And What Do You Do?’ – “I’m a typist”.

Chris Brogan says we should all share a little more. Personally, I believe sharing information and experience helps us to feel a bit more connected, respected, valued and keeps us on our toes. Its a way of reaching out to others you might never meet face to face but can still give and receive something of value. Its so simple, why wouldn’t you?……

This is a quick fix summary by Gina Trapani with some tips for making social media work for you instead of you being a slave to it.

A fascinating new ebook is downloadable from Seth’s blog but as you are reading this you can do it from here. He has organised more than seventy big thinkers, each sharing an idea for you to think about as we head into the new year.

Here’s the deal: it’s free. Download it here. Or from any of the many sites around the web that are posting it with insightful commentary. Tweet it, email it, post it on your own site. I think it might be fun to make up your own riff and post it on your blog or online profile as well. It’s a good exercise. Can we get this in the hands of 5 million people? You can find an easy to use version on Scribd as well and from wepapers. Please share.

Have fun. Here’s to a year with ideas even bigger than these.

Twitter – it delivers trust, speed and brand. Now everything you ever wanted to know about it.