Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

When my Sugar sits down to eat

That’s when his cell goes “Tweet tweet tweet.”

And in the ev’ning when the sun goes down

It’s never quiet when he’s around.

He’s so Twittery I’ll aver

Those one hundred-forty characters

Are just enough for talkin’ sweet

When Sugar’s cell phone goes “Tweet tweet tweet.”

Actually tweets are more impersonal than my parody implies. The little, spontaneous messages are sent forth to all the tweeter’s followers, dozens or hundreds, or, for celebrities and government figures and companies, thousands or ten-thousands, or just keep adding zeros.

Which brings me to what I set out to write about, before Nat Cole and then Ella Fitzgerald and Teresa Brewer started playing on my mental jukebox.

It turns out that Twitter is a great marketing tool. Or it is if it is used properly.

Twitter was launched nearly eight years ago. Its 200 million users active in a given month send 340 million tweets on a given day, 10.2 billion in that given month. Of course those 340 million tweets in a day are not divided equally among the active users, at 1.7 tweets each, for some send out tweets many times a day, to all their rapt followers anxious to know every vapid thought that flits through the birdbrain of the popinjay they are following.

Marketing? Well, celebrities are marketing their  status as celebs, and hoping to make the news by saying something outrageous or even profound. But there is serious business use of Twitter. Here are some of the instructions I have seen for business or enterprise users of Twitter:

• Avoid tweeting just to tweet. Your business followers will resent your demanding their attention, even for a few seconds, for no good reason.

• Use hashtags that have meaning within your industry to find worthwhile connections to follow.

• Become an on-scene reporter when you attend an event of significance in your field. Send out tweets about what is happening, what the key-noter just said, what new product has caught your eye.

• Link to a photo now and then, because a photo might be worth more than 140 characters.

• Don’t always use the whole 140-character allotment. Sometimes you want the tweet-ee to retweet, and that might take 20 characters.

• Include a CTA—a call to action—in you want your tweet to elicit a response. That might take 20 characters.

• Request retweets sparingly; otherwise your followers will tune out such pleas.

• It may be cute and friendly to use lots of abbreviations and texting expressions in purely social online communications, but in the business and professional world, or when you want to be influential for a serious purpose, use correct spelling and grammar. Otherwise you come across as a lightweight, who has little respect for your cause and your followers, or as someone who lacks communication skills and credibility. Tweet without sounding like a twit.

• Two hashtags is the limit. More than that are spam.

• Twitter is the most immediate of posting media. Tweeting and responding are done “in real time,” or close to it. So when you get a message calling for a response, provide it soon, as in within the hour.

“Every time #Sweetie goes walking

Down some sunny street

She sets the Twitterverse talking

With tweet after tweet… “

Sorry. Channeling Lou Rawls, there.

•    •    •

Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded what company in 1972?

No, not Microsoft. That came ages later. It was Traf-O-Data. It didn’t just count traffic, but analyzed it.

Much later, after MS-DOS in many versions, when they finally got around to making a graphical user interface operating system (after snitching ideas they got from a GUI that had been snitched from Xerox) Gates wanted to call it—no, not Windows. He liked “Interface Manager.” A cooler head, probably Allen’s prevailed.

Microsoft’s 10,000th U.S. patent was registered in 2009, at the time the company introduced Surface, which was presented as something like a big, touch responsive table.

Microsoft wanted to buy Skype for $8.5 billion, back in 2011, more than they had paid for any other company.

The tune played by chimes in big buildings, and even mantel clocks and my old Casio watch, is just a traditional chime tune, right? Nope, it’s eight bars written by Handel. And the notes that welcomed users when Windows  95 started up were just a tiny melody some Softie liked; you think? No, Microsoft contracted with Brian Eno for that composition. Well, Handel wasn’t available, and Zoltan Kodaly’s biggest (and shortest) hit had been used in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

That’s the official term Microsoft uses for its employees, by the way: Softies.

When he was in eighth grade, Bill Gates impressed his classmates by writing some code that did subtraction in base eight, right? Nuh-uh. You might be thinking of Tom Lehrer’s wonderfully instructive song, “New Math.” Billy’s program played tic-tac-toe.