7Seven Deadly Sins

7 Deadly Sins of Twitter
by Guest Poster on October 23, 2009
in Beginner’s Guide

By Zoey Dowling. Follow her @zoeyspeak.

Twitter is a bright, shiny universe of new friends, new ideas, hilarious little snippets and occasionally even a spot of news. It’s a great way to promote your blog or your business. But if your primary purpose on twitter is promotion and not to connect with other people – abandon ship. Twitter is not for you. Ulterior motives don’t do well. They result in one action: UNFOLLOW. Mistakes are easy when you start out. After all, no-one is updating their status – they’re engaging with one another! And that’s confusing – is it private or can you join in? How do you make the most of it and have fun? Well for starters you could avoid the most irritating twitter behaviours. And before you start trawling through my twitter stream – yes I have committed most of them.

1. Gluttony (Over-Sharing)
Do not, I repeat do not over-share. Do you really want to know about someone else’s digestive problems? I didn’t think so. When you went into graphic detail about your gastric flu did you consider all the people reading your tweets while they were eating? Your followers should be wanting to know more about you, not less.

2. Pride (Over-Promotion)
People get pretty sick of you if all they here are continual, duplicated plugs for whatever it is that you’re promoting. The argument that some of your followers may have missed it because of the timing doesn’t hold water. It’s extremely irritating to see exactly the same tweet repeated. Get creative and find a way to send the same link in a different way. For example “my loyal follower has just commented at my blog, what do you think?” And yes over-promotion includes blathering about blog stats, follower numbers or fans.

3. Sloth (Automatic Anything)
Anything that is automated means that you don’t care enough to make it personal. This includes automated DM messages for new followers, an automatic tweet in response to keywords or an auto-follow in response to keywords. This puts you squarely into the spambot category. If you don’t want to spend the time on twitter to be personal, don’t bother at all.

4. Greed (Not Engaging)
Things get pretty boring pretty fast if all you do is update your status, post links, post pictures and promote your blog. In order for people to care about any of that, you need to engage with them. This involves replying when something sparks your interest, or you think you can be of help; re-tweeting where you can add value; and getting involved in the discussion.

5. Envy (Crashing the Party)
Work out the difference between joining the discussion and crashing someone’s private conversation. If a tweet starts with @user it generally means it’s not for public debate because if the author wanted everyone they follow to see it there would be another character in front of the @user to make it visible to everyone. But if you really want to participate in the discussion at the very least acknowledge that you’re crashing. It’s less douchey that way.

6. Wrath (Blasting)
I don’t care how passionate you are about your topic, there is no excuse for blasting. There is nothing wrong with how passionate you are and that passion will probably lead you to find many like-minded people on twitter. But (and it’s a big but), ramming your opinion down someone else’s throat when they don’t agree with you is no way to promote your cause or yourself – particularly if you haven’t taken the time to get to know the person at the end of your rant. I’m sorry activists but twitter isn’t really designed for you because you end up unleashing the bulk of your argument about a theory on one person. Not really fair is it?

7. Lust (Celebrity Stalking)
Everyone loves to follow a celebrity or two. Nothing wrong with that. Although fair warning if you follow @mrskutcher and @aplusk you will have to witness some pretty treacly interchanges. It’s not the celebrity part that is the problem it’s all of their followers. If you say anything at all that could be vaguely interpreted as negative, be prepared for all of their followers to be all over you like a rash. In part because celebrities are so idolised but mostly because deep down their followers are thinking that by attacking you, ‘the hater’, the celebrity will acknowledge them, and might actually follow them back. So avoid the lemmings, they’re not worth it.

TwiTip

Why does earth have all these endless problems?

GREED – and MORE of it won’t stop the pain we are all in.

And trying to be billionaires is the CAUSE of woe…not the solution to it.

Sure, billionaires “appear” wealthy and “better off” than everyone else, but greed destroys the planet, and puts us ALL in degraded and dangerous conditions.

Instead of trying to be LIKE billionaire monsters, we need to be financially and sexually ethical…and thus gain a far greater level of well being than ANY billionaire will ever attain.

Billionaires are gluttonous fools who face unavoidable consequences for their actions anyway.

They’re screwed up like the rest of the planet. Our collective greed is where all the evil is coming from.

Bogeymen like Osama or Saddamn are distractions from our own bad behavior.

Not everyone is an evil-doer…but collectively we are ALL negligent of maintaining the common good. We TOLERATE, and even admire the VERY THING that causes us all the grief.

GREED is the Cause of that 911 incident…and a LOT more is coming if we don’t end the greed.

And the fact is…if we don’t end the greed…someone is going to bomb US, sooner or later. Shoot people…bomb people, and eventually somebody shoots back. Maybe not all at once…but in time, and ALL of it is bad.

I don’t need this crap. None of us needs the Mass insanity of a D-Day massacre. It’s bad. All war is bad.

I’m sick of it ALL..

So why war??? It’s because rather than being REASONABLE…everybody expects to own a yacht the size of the Titanic.

Everybody expects a trillion dollars for doing as little as possible.

If we end the greed…we won’t LOSE anything except misery. Nobody is supposed to own a 99% share of the world. What we ARE supposed to possess is a state of well being far SUPERIOR to what we have now, and greater than ANY billionaire maniac will EVER have…and without horrific consequences and side effects.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!!!

End the greed, and end the mass insanity that is on it’s way beginning in the form of MORE contrived TERROR attacks. Terrorism is the deliberate creation of a society of greedy maniacs who don’t know what good governance even is.

Government is FAILING us. That’s because the greed infected do not even know what’s wrong…much less how to fix the mess.

All they see is MORE GREED. It’s a lunatic insanity of “Gold Fever” where everybody kills each other off trying to jump each other’s claim. We need the COMMON GOOD restored. NOT more greed.

When people are asked to take a sledge hammer to their home they refuse because they know the consequences of their actions. But they are blinded to the damage their behavior has done to themselves and to the planet or even recognize its origin. That is what makes this world an insane asylum.

Humans, grow up…BEFORE the universe has to get rid of you.

We’ll all end up happy, and feeling better.

1 Timothy 6:9-10;”But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition. For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.”

The Revelation
Woe is caused by Greed

Federal survey finds some getting alcohol from their parents

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

THURSDAY, June 26 (HealthDay News) — More than half of American teens say they’ve consumed alcohol, and more than 40 percent of those children say they sometimes get their alcohol free from an adult, a new federal survey found.

Among the country’s estimated 10.8 million underage drinkers, more than 40 percent said they got alcohol free from an adult during the past month. One in four said they got the alcohol from an unrelated adult, one in 16 got it from a parent or guardian, and one in 12 got the alcohol from a family member, according to the survey.

“There are a relatively large number of persons aged 12 to 20 who consume alcohol,” said James Colliver, a statistician with the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). “A number of them are likely to get alcohol from a parent or another family member or other adult. Read more….