“Those who have mastered etiquette, who are entirely, impeccably right, would seem to arrive at a point of exquisite dullness. - Dorothy Parker

Now I absolutely adore Twitter and use it consistently and constantly for business, events, new blog posts, and even links to Flickr showing pictures of my new Fisher & Paykel dishwasher. If you had one, you would too.

For those of you not well-versed in the language of Twitter, but hear the buzzword all the time, I am briefly going to point our some etiquette tips, how to use the application to boost your business, blog, podcast and more, as well as really cool things you can do with it.

Twitter is known as a “presence application”, micro-blogging and basically my term, crack.  Yes, it is addicting and it is like crack. You could spend all day on it, and while some do, there is an underlying “etiquette” attached to the application as well as some ways to really use the application to boost your web presence. I don’t know who makes up the etiquette, I can only imagine the Twitternazis. I am not here to enforce them; just explaining a few for the new people to Twitter.

If Twitter were a movie, it would be like Vin Diesel in the Fast and the Furious. I happen to like the Tokyo Drift version of F&F, but that is for another day.  If Twitter were a TV show, it would be like Top Gear, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, and Game 7 of the World Series combined. Get it?

The basic tenets of Twitter is in its byline of “What are you doing?” Twitterers will tweet in 140 characters (the limit for texts on cell phones) what it is they are doing and the legion of followers will read what you are doing. It’s that simple.  And it is very effective.

While we know that all tech companies have a personality on Twitter, or if they don’t, they are totally missing the boat. But Twitter is now used by many mainstream companies such as JetBlue, Zappos, H&R Block, and Comcast, (It’s Comcastic!) to name a few. These companies realize that their customers use Twitter, so they want to be there to offer free customer service and advice on their products and services and will tune into any tweets possibly dissing the companies as well as when they are lauded. I am so surprised that my 99 tweets on “Netflix Sucks” still has had no bites from Netflix to ask me why. Why?  Because you sent me No Country for Old Men 4 times in a row. That is not a movie to be seen more than once, and certainly not 4 times in a row. Extremely depressing, Friend-o.

Here are some rules of engagement for newcomers as well as seasoned denizens of Twitterville. I don’t make them up, but there are some Twitternazis out there who swear by them.

1.) Twitter may not be for everyone, but you will never know unless you try. Signup for an account. It’s free. Give yourself a good username. If you want to brand your business or yourself, use those. If you don’t want people to know you then make something up. Like @JohnHolmes, @RevWright or @TomCruiseIsAnAlien. You know, something inconspicuous and outside the realm of the mainstream media. Make a good description. Add your website or blog link.

2.) Post your first Twitter “Tweet” by yourself and test. Don’t follow anyone yet, don’t let people follow you, just test the waters a few times. Get the hang of it. The first few times you probably will not even use 140 characters. After a month of using Twitter, striving to keep to 140 characters will become an art form and you will contort every word and letter into a compressed symbol. Like Prince.

3.) Start by following people you may know, you respect, you want to learn more from, or just things that sound cool. To follow only means that you get to read their tweets. They cannot read yours unless they “follow” you. I would suggest following people locally first, so type into the search bar your location; perhaps Cape Cod, Boston, or San Jose. Find those around you and listen to what they are saying. I do this as we have regular Twitter meetups and like to invite new people in the area to get together for some good clean tech fun!  And cocktails.

I personally like following social media folks with substance, sports updates, friends, colleagues, breaking tech news and people sharing the same interests. It’s fun. It’s community. And it is a much underused business tool as well, I truly believe.

Some of the coolest things I follow include @cookbook, who does a recipe in 140 characters!  I follow web app companies so I know when a new version has been released. I tweet back and forth with my old prep school freshman roommate who I have not seen for 25 years. Damn! Now I can no longer lie about being 27…

I also have many Twitter accounts that I use for diverse purposes, one of which is @GeekGirlCamp, and my business one, @Genevangelist. I would suggest you do the same and follow different people for whatever the medium/message your username implies, or whatever you want to get out of the exchanges between yourself and your followers.

4.) Don’t have political debates on Twitter and annoy anyone. Use IM with the other bozo you are trying to impress or do it somewhere else. Twitter is all about short tweets of information and it works extremely well this way. We don’t need a line-by-line dissertation and fisticuffs while responding to Jesse Jackson’s insidious Obama nut cutoff speech, or John McCain’s inability to lift his arms over his head and do “the Wave”. He was in a body cast in a Vietnamese prison camp, dude. It’s not for lack of Vitamin D. But, I digress…

5.) Don’t listen to people who say you should tweet only with the people you know, or you should only follow people who follow you. Do whatever you want.

Having more contacts runs in proportion with more people following you which runs in proportion to people actually reading your tweets which runs in proportion to mo’ sales for you. I’m just saying. So, never feel like you cannot follow everyone. I really respect the fact that @GuyKawasaki, @Scobleizer and some others follow everyone who follows them! As of this moment, Guy has 15,213 followers and follows 16,784! Robert Scoble follows 21,059 and has 29,129 followers!

So what does this mean? If you want to run with the big dogs, you can’t piss like a puppy. Or you could just translate that to the fact that maybe you need to follow a heck of a lot more people, some high-profile, for them to notice you.

And if you don’t like this post and don’t like following me, then you can just do what I do (and the famously loquacious entity I follow @scobelizer) and say screw it if you don’t like my posts. That’s what the “unfollow” button is for. :-)

Tweet On.

Please comment below on any Twitterquette issues you agree/disagree with and include your Twitter handle.