As I tell many of our clients, your tweets aren't just seen by your followers! Unless you've 'protected your tweets,' your posts also go into what's called the "public timeline." It contains all the tweets that are being pumped out through Twitter by people like you.

I like to think of the public timeline is like a giant bowl of M&M's. If you want to eat only the blue M&M's, you can easily pick them out of the bowl.

Twitter Search does just that.It allows you to filter the public timeline and find people that share the things your interested in. Perhaps you are on a "vegitarian diet."

In addition, there are some-thousands of Twitter applications that also integrate the public timeline and search/filter capabilities. You can see how valuable it is that your tweets be included in those public spaces.

In the name of spam protection, Twitter has sophisticated methods to identify a spaming twitter account. If you've been flagged you tweets will not be seen in the public timeline (oh no!).

To check, search twitter with your twitter handle (@yournamehere)

Check Now!

If you saw your tweets appear in the search results your okay. If you didn't see your tweets, check to see when you tweeted last, if it's been a while try a test tweet and see if they show up. If they still aren't showing up, then you need to fill out a support ticket with Twitter. Here is the form to do that
http://help.twitter.com/requests/new

Hope this helps!

Ning is a social networking platform similar to Facebook and Myspace. It's grown to hundreds of thousands of micro-networks where people with specific causes or interests can get together and share blog posts, discussions, photos and videos. Facebook, Linkedin, and Twitter get most the chatter in the social networking, so it's often overlooked as a place to engage, but on Ning networks you'll find more engagement and more relationship building since the networks are usually pretty specific communities.

Ning networks are like Facebook Pages, on steroids.

Ning uses what's called a Ning ID, once you create your Ning ID, you are then able to join multiple networks on the platform, using only one login and password. Within the Ning, you'll find networks that range in a variety of different industries and area of interests. Search Ning to find a network that is in your industry, or area of interest, and see why Ning is growing so fast. As a business owner or marketer, you may find opportunities to advertise or interact with your specific target audience, or you may decided to centralize your community in a Ning network.

Here are a few examples of popular Ning Networks:

ImSaturn - u r 2
We Love Etsy

Check out the Ning Network Spotlight for more.

Flickr/ CC BY-SA 2.0

The Refresh Project is a community investment campaign for people and organizations to submit ideas on how they would make a positive impact in their community. Each month up to 1,000 ideas are submitted into six categories (health, arts & culture, food and shelter, the planet, neighborhoods, and education). Up to 32 Pepsi Refresh Grants are awarded based on a public voting system, and grants can vary in size from $5k, $25k, $50k, and $250k.

Sound familiar?

You may remember Change.org hosting a similar campaign in 2008, during the presidential race. Now Change.org has evolved into a fantastic model for social voting and collaboration (see also: digg).

Bravo Pepsi, Bravo

The potential outcome for this campaign is enormous! On the surface, they are supporting on-the-ground social entrepreneurs, leading amazing projects around a variety of different issues, with unmeasurable ripple effects. Below the surface, they are leading the way large brands interact with civilization, beyond their products or services and are becoming something more.

I'd be amiss if I didn't recognize that Pepsi, a soda, is less then stellar for human health and contributes to vast amounts of pollution and waste throughout its life cycle. Pepsi, a subsidiary of Pepsico, at least recognizes this and makes it pretty clear what they are doing to mitigate the damage they are causing and address top line issues (learn more on PepsiCo).

Photo by Bob Jagendorf

CC on Flickr

We've had a great break and we're back at it now in the Earthsite office. 2010 is full of unknowns and excitement as people are laying out their predictions for the new year and the new decade. Earlier today I received a great post, via my Google Alerts, that does a great job of reminding us just how far technology and the social web has come in ten years (from a blog called Life Lessons). I'm looking forward to the evolution of the social web for this next decade, as it promises to be just as amazing as the past.

One thing is for sure- the only thing certain is change. Happy New Year!

Thought I'd do something a little special today. Here is a somewhat random list of 240 brands on Twitter, taken from our OpenBrands.org lab project. Compare, contrast, follow, share, and have fun (they'll open in a new window so you can browse around). You'll see a lot of different types of brands, tweeting in many different styles along with different profile designs and descriptions.

Enjoy and Happy Holidays!

Share this list on Twitter

Photo by kittyireland Flickr, CC

Descriptions, tags and titles can all help your content be seen

Have you added content to the web lately? If you have, have you been tagging your photos, videos and blog posts? What about writing a brief description? If you're not, and are promoting your content, you may be missing out. Tags and desciptions not only make your stuff easier for people to search for, it also help keep the web nice and organized. (p.s.-you can usually go back and add title tags, and descriptions)

When tagging your stuff, make sure you are using keywords appropriately, adding short descriptions, and relevant titles. Think of it like this, "what do you want this image, video, or blog post to be associated with?" Most tagging systems break each keyword into separate terms, but if your item should be relevant to a more specific term you can use paranthesis to combine terms, and word combinations matter! Use as many relevant, specific keywords as possible, but avoid overinflating your tags.

For an example of tags in work: I'm searching Flickr's Creative Commons images for Bengal Tigers. I'd like a great shot of a tiger swimming underwater. I may type in "bengal tiger water" and yield these results. Hum... not really what I'm looking for, but if I search "bengal tiger" then I yeild these results and ahh much better!

Counter-intuitive isn't it? Shouldn't I have hit what I was looking for initially when I was specific the first time around? In this example, my results were front and center when I was less specific, but what if I had to search 50 pages to find the right image. Hello time sink!

Now pretent that underwater bengal tiger is your blog post, video, or image. Wouldn't you want someone to find it when they searched the first time? Tags, title, and description can get them there faster.