Your private one can be anything… The shorter the better… Like, “mdg” or somthing.

Your FULL NAME will be displayed next to your username everywhere anyway.

It’s definitely NOT for “What are you doing now?”

It has much higher purposes….

Micro-blogging.

Community-Building.

and…..

Micro-emailing….. with very very important busy people…

There!

I’ve coined a new term!

You heard it here first….

Twitter is for:

Micro-blogging

and

Micro-emailing

Bravo! You’ve just described EXACTLY…. the whole point of the two-tiered (two-account) system!

Your “Type II — Broadcasting and Audience-Building Account”… is the one you use to connect with readers, and potential readers, of your books. You build community with them, and have your conversations with them there.

Your “Type I — Quality Content Reader and Hero Connector — Private VIP Account”… is the one you use to connect with your VIPs… publishers, press, media types, bloggers, filmmakers, whatever… And THAT account is where you communicate with them (only)…. And THAT account is where they will NOTICE YOU…

Note: You can make the themes and colors and even the complete bios…. identical… for both accounts… if you want to… for branding. Since they are for two completely different purposes… no one will ever communicate with you on BOTH accounts — only on one of them. So they’ll only see one. Your Full Name and everything else will be the same…

In fact, on both of your accounts, there could be not one bit of difference, in appearance, except for the twitter username…

This way, you are promoting yourself, your work, your projects, your books,…. whatever it is that you do… to everyone in the world, in a consistent way, with a consistent message.

Oh, and, of course….. The most important CRITICAL thing on your Twitter profile…. your WEB SITE URL…. Will take everyone to your web site. And your web site, obviously, must be designed to impress…. everyone… All your best work should be there… in top form.

The fact that your Type VIP account will only show “conversational” @replies does not matter…. As long as they are intelligent, thoughtful, helpful messages… and they will all be directed to BIG WIGS… and industry VIPs… That fact will not go unnoticed.

Then there’s this: one of the ways/reasons I use Twitter and other social media is to connect with potential readers of my books. I do this by being as “social” as I can. As people connect with me through what I tweet and through our “conversations,” there more likely to be interested in what I’ve written.

At the same time, I want the VIPs to notice me — be they media types, bloggers, filmmakers, etc.

How would your two-tiered approach work there?

PS I’ll never ever post a comment on a (wordpress?) blog via my iPhone again! You can’t scroll back to see what you’ve done without hitting “done” to clear the keyboard off the screen. Actually, I just discovered that I still can’t scroll back to the top! So apologies for uncorrected typos and unmitigated nonsense!

“I don’t use twitter. No time.”

So I replied to him….

Think of email.

You DO do email.

One Liners via email = Twitter

Except……. with one major exception….

The CAPTAINS of industry use twitter.

The CEOs of the largest companies are easily accessible via Twitter.

The CEOs of the largest companies are NOT easily accessible via Email.

Reply to Twitter @replies only once a day, and it takes no more time than email…

AND….

I’m telling you….

All your HEROS in life… are on Twitter.

I don’t know who YOUR heros are….

But mine include…..

CEOs of the big big biggest companies
Celebrities
Top Technocrats
The most famous Musicians
The Biggest Political Candidates and Politicians
Television and Movie Stars
National and International TV News Anchors
The Most Famous Authors
ALL the biggest Journalists in Every country
ALL the biggest PR Professionals in Every country

….and the list goes on.

Do a Ctrl-F to FIND the words “Direct message” on the page.

Click “Highlight All” on your Firefox Ctrl-F Find toolbar…

This way the ones who follow you will just off the page…

And you won’t Remove any of them by mistake!

ANOTHER TIP

Start with the 5th page of your people you follow….

This way you won’t be Removing people who you just most recently began Following…

(Those people who may not have yet had TIME to begin following you back…)

You wanna give them at least a week to get the notification, and begin following you back…

In fact, you don’t even need to Remove people who don’t follow you, at all, unless… either….

(1) You run into some sort of limit on how many people you can follow, and you need to remove some.
or
(2) You just want your numbers to look closer in size (Following vs Followers)…. and not so lopsided.

Rather than use http://FriendorFollow.com — which shows you a nice list, but doesn’t let you DO anything about it easily.

I’ve discovered that the best way to do it is…

Use http://Twitter.com/home and click on the number “Following” you.

Go down that list and look for a “Direct message” link under each user’s name. If you don’t see one, that means they are not following you. Click “Remove”.

Simple.

Get it?

No “Direct message” link = Click “Remove”

This way, your (Type II) account will not be top-heavy with people you are following and are not following you.

This is important because you don’t want your account to look like you follow more people than follow you. That’s the biggest red flag that says, “SPAMMER!!!”

And we don’t want people to think that…. when they see your profile…

Well, it’s not as much “partitioning thoughts” as you might think…

And, once you really get into Twitter… and get ‘bitten’ by the Twitter bug… This system will begin to make much more sense to you …and you will come to realize the critical importance of this Two-Account System.

The Type II account is simply your Broadcasting account… Think of it as your blog… Your micro-blog. The place where you spout off every interesting thought you have… Where you post about every cool new discovery you find… Where you ask great thought-provoking questions… (all via http://Ping.fm of course).

The Type I account you never post to. Never. It is your Reader. Think of it almost like a News Reader account… except you are reading the thoughts, musings, bloggings, and conversations… of the elite… the “coolest people”, in your mind.

In BOTH cases, you’ll regularly (at least once a day) read all your @replies directed to you… and reply to each of them… of course.

You will have “conversations”, via @reply, on both accounts.

However…
______

You’ll only POST ITEMS to your Type II account. And never read the main stream in it…

You’ll only READ the main stream in your Type I account (reading the thoughts of your heros / gurus). And you’ll never post items (status, updates, microblog, etc.) on it…

______

It’s really not that difficult… especially since you’ll use separate tools most of the time.

For your Type I account — for READING — you’ll always leave it logged on to Twitter on your desktop and iPhone browser.

For your Type II account — for POSTING — you’ll always leave http://Ping.fm logged on… on your desktop and iPhone browser.

Throughout the day, as you see one of your guru / heros say something interesting… or ask a question… or whatever… You’ll send them an appropriate (respectful, considerate, helpful) @reply message. Result: You’re now building a relationship with this person!

Then, once or twice a day, you’ll go through every @reply on each account…. and reply to every one.

On your TYPE I account, be careful not to follow anyone other than your elite of the elite. Don’t be tempted to follow anyone else there. Keep it VIP only.

On your TYPE II account, follow absolutely everyone. (Don’t follow too many people all at once, on any given day, else your account might be mistaken for a spammer account.) Build this account’s number of users. As many as you can. As fast as you can.

On your Type II account, If you want to balance out the number of Following vs Followers — to make it more equal — use http://FriendorFollow.com and remove all “People who don’t follow you back”.

On your Type I account, you follow your guru / heroes. You don’t care if anyone follows you at all. You might want to occasionally look at who is following you there, and ‘block’ all spammers, and all who are definitely not anyone you’d consider a guru / hero (after taking a look at their twitter page).

ANOTHER IMPORTANT POINT ABOUT CHAT

Chat is one of the biggest time-wasters invented my man. Unless it’s with someone really, really, really important to you…. like your spouse….. or Barack Obama…. or Madonna herself… I would recommend a….

No Chat Policy

This means, only one one-liner message/reply per day.

As soon as you send MORE THAN ONE one-liner message WITHIN 24 HOURS, you are now chatting…

The easiest way to accomplish this, naturally, is to set aside one time in your daily routine — like first thing in the morning over coffee, or just after dinner in the evening, for example — to do all of your @replies. Do all of your @replies on one account. Then, log out and do all of your @replies on the other account. Then do all your email.

Thoughts?