I was baffled for a moment until I ran across a follower whose profile only had a repeating rotation of the same tweets, posted at the same times everyday from an API. In fact, I couldn’t find anything recent that hadn’t come from the API. This person hadn’t posted anything live in months. Almost everything there was either spam or blatant self promotion. No replies or interactions with other users, no original non-link posts of his own – I began to wonder, is this even real human? And worse, if I continued scheduling all of my tweets is this what people will find when they venture to my profile?

As if that wasn’t enough of a sign, that very same day someone in my stream posted something to the effect of: “I can’t hear you over all these APIs!” I can’t remember who said this, but I got the message. It was an eye-opening experience and made me rethink my practices and the purposes for scheduling tweets in the first place. But clearly, there are some benefits to scheduling that your followers will actually appreciate.

1. To allow you to spread your tweets throughout the day:
Scheduling tweets can be a good thing, it allows you to spread your tweets over the course of a day without flooding the Twittersphere with back-to-back tweets. I find it annoying when one person decides to dump a thousand tweets in row and then leave. So what you’ve only got a few minutes to log on, interact and reply to all your @mentions. You’re hogging up the airwaves! No one else can get through and really after the 8th or 9th tweet in a row, no one’s listening to you anymore anyway.

So schedule your tweets so that you can spread them out evenly so you don’t over-tweet in a short period of time. I do this especially when I’ve got several replies or RTs that I want to post – it allows me to still interact with others, but without dominating all the space. They still see their mentions and no one has to complain because my face keeps popping up and drowning everyone else out.

2. To allow you to tweet during peak hours:
This always you to be more visible at a time when more people are actually there to notice your tweets. If you know you won’t be available during those high traffic times, schedule your tweets so that they appear then. But don’t schedule them at exactly the same time every single day. It’s okay to post a tweet at 5:22pm, it doesn’t have to always be 5:00pm. If you have several tweets to post, spread them out – schedule no less than 15 minutes apart. Your followers will thank you for that.

Scheduling tweets is not a substitute for authentically engaging others on Twitter, it simply makes it easier for you to do so in the least evasive way. You should still respond to and retweet other’s updates/content. At least 50% of what you tweet should be someone else’s work, although 60% is probably better.

So which API platform is the best to use for scheduling tweets? I’ve been using HootSuite – it’s multi-dimensional and allows me also to schedule updates for Facebook and other social network sites. I love it the most because it allows me to have access to all of my favorite social sites in one neat place.

What is your favorite Twitter API with scheduling capabilities?

Are there other valid (non-annoying) reasons for scheduling tweets that I’ve overlooked here?

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

To Schedule Tweets or No? Two Reasons You Should.

The fact that the Ledbetter case involved a 20-year-long pay dispute has lead to the thinking that payroll and associated records have to be kept nearly forever. Of course it’s a good idea to keep comprehensive records, but –

• Pay records alone may not be the best defense against a bias claim, and
• Courts recognize that there’s a limit to the amount of recordkeeping companies can maintain, especially small companies.

So, what is the best defense against wage-bias claims? The attorneys at Fisher & Phillips recommend:

• Providing employees with a system to challenge wage decisions on the basis of discrimination. This will both help prevent discrimination as well as provide the employer with the ability to create a record at the time of the decision.
• Adding objective factors to the decisionmaking process that allow decisions to be defended. In other words, try to be sure that your process has defined measures — output, quality, etc. — for awarding pay raises and promotion. That’s better than just vaguely saying or writing, “You did a good job this year.” What’s a “good job”?
• Setting a baseline for all raises and requiring written documentation and review for any deviation from the baseline, up or down. If almost everyone gets, say, a 3% raise, what justifies some people getting more or less than that?
• Providing decisionmakers with forms that guide them in explaining their decisions. As much as possible, don’t leave it up to supervisors to be creative. Hand them the forms that meet your criteria.

Nothing will guarantee that your company will never be sued for wage discrimination. All you can do is set up the best system to prevent lawsuits and to defend yourself in case of a lawsuit.

The Department of Labor’s released new proposed regs on providing advice to participants in individual retirement plans.

The proposed investment advice rules are intended to make sure that workers receive unbiased advice about how to invest in 401(k)-type plans.

The DOL will be accepting comments on the regs until May 5, and the regs are expected to be effective 60 days after publication of the final rule.

Here’s a quick look at some of the key provisions.

According to the proposed rules, investment advice can be given under the Pension Protection Act’s statutory exemption from liability (which allows employers to hire outsiders to provide investment advice to plan participants), but only if the advice is provided in two ways:

• through a financial advisor who is compensated on a “level-fee” basis, or
• through the use of a computer model that is certified as unbiased.

Level fees

The financial services company has to charge a flat fee schedule — in other words, fees don’t change depending on what investment options participants choose.

Computer models

If the rules are adopted, computer models used to offer advice would have to be certified in advance as objective and unbiased by an independent expert.

To comment on the proposed rules, click here.

Westat recently performed an evaluation of E-Verify for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and estimated that the program’s “inaccuracy rate for unauthorized workers” is about 54%.

That means one out of every two unauthorized workers is slipping past the system.

The reason? Many unauthorized workers commit identity fraud that E-Verify cannot detect, found Westat.

As a result, the DHS has stated that it’s working to improve the program by adding more databases and a photo-screening tool, and stepping up efforts to detect identity fraud.

However, while there are still problems that need to be worked out, E-Verify’s accuracy has improved.

Westat’s evaluation found that 96% of all workers were screened accurately — correctly identifying 93.1% of people as being allowed to work in the U.S. and 2.9% as unauthorized. Some 3.3% were unauthorized workers mistaken for authorized ones, and 0.7% were individuals who could work in the U.S. but where originally identified as unauthorized.

Then I didn’t write the interview for a week.

Then I complained about the questions: I don’t really believe in triumph. Because the most triumphant moments are the days when I have no idea how I'm going to fix anything, but I get out of bed anyway. On the other hand, the moments of huge achievement are not actually that hard to get to. By the time you're close, you are so motivated to get there that it doesn't feel like work at all.

So I wrote that. And then I felt bad.  So I tried to give an example. People like examples. And  I like Psychology Today. And I didn’t want to disappoint them.

So I wrote that the moment when I was a freelance writer and a new mom and had post-partum depression but I knew I had to keep working so I had to get out of bed and write. Maybe there were fifty moments like that. Or five hundred. But those are the moments of triumph.  The thing is, I think it was probably messed up that I kept working and did not check myself into a hospital. And then I started thinking that all my moments of triumph came at the heels of me having done something totally terrible.

Like, let me tell you right now that before I could play volleyball professionally, I was literally starving. So I stole bagels at the bagel shop. I have had about ten editors take that out of my writing. Out of my Business 2.0 column, out of my book, and my editor will tell me now that this is not good to put in a post. Stealing is bad, right? But my point is that it’s very hard to do some extraordinary triumph without taking some extraordinary risk or making an odd judgment that other people would not make. That’s why the triumph is extraordinary.

Another thing about the bullshit of big triumphs: Our big moments — where we can change the world — come because so many other people have helped us, and luck has come to us. But our small moments, when no one is watching and no one cares and the only thing that makes us try again is an unreasonable belief that we can get what we want for ourselves — those are the triumphs that we do all by ourselves.

When I have been on the cusp of huge success, there have always been people to help me. For example, my agent stayed with me when I was out of money but about to get a six-figure book deal.

But there was no one helping me get out of bed the day I knew I had to start writing my book proposal even though the odds of getting  a big book deal from it were terrible.  The daily task of believing things will improve when then things look bad. We do that on our own, and each time I do it I am thankful, in a deep, spiritual way. I'm not sure what keeps me going when everything looks terrible, but I know that each time I do it, it's a triumph. And it happens a lot.

Another thing. Everyone, please shut up about your biggest failures. I hate when people write about their failures because they always write about how they pulled themselves up, or what they learned. And really, then, it's not a failure, is it? It's a learning opportunity, or a chance to shine. Failure is something you did not overcome. You did not learn from. And most people are too embarrassed to write about it. High achievers don't have failures because they can learn from everything.

There is no finish line, there is no gold prize. There is only living with yourself, day after day. So each day needs to be a small triumph so you can pat yourself on the back before you go to sleep. I try to do that. Today's triumph is doing this interview with Psychology Today. Sure, I couldn’t quite do it, and I had to be quirky and weird, and it probably cost me getting into the article. But at least I wrote something.

Comment on: The biggest triumph is getting out of bed

I encountered this quote in an "inspirational" slide deck with music called "Are You A Leader," which was apparently done by a company called Signature. A reader named Matt was kind enough to point me to it, suggesting I might like it.  I did like a lot of the quotes in it and it was well done, although it is a little too pretty and uncritical for my tastes, but that probably says more about my personality than the quality of the deck -- which was clearly done with much thought and care.

I encountered this quote in an "inspirational" slide deck with music called "Are You A Leader," which was apparently done by a company called Signature. A reader named Matt was kind enough to point me to it, suggesting I might like it.  I did like a lot of the quotes in it and it was well done, although it is a little too pretty and uncritical for my tastes, but that probably says more about my personality than the quality of the deck -- which was clearly done with much thought and care.

What happened

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) went after Sears, Roebuck & Co., when the company terminated 235 former workers immediately following their return to work after being out on workers’ compensation leave.

Sears violated the ADA when it refused to provide reasonable accommodations to employees who were returning from workers’ comp leave, the EEOC said.

Result: Sears agreed to settle for $6.2 million, and each employee in the suit will receive around $26,300. That’s the largest total settlement in the history of the EEOC.

In addition, Sears improved its workers’ compensation leave process and posted notices regarding the decree, according to EEOC officials.

Do you think this settlement is fair? Let us know in the Comments Box below.

Monitor and Listen First
Perform searches to find out which of your audience members and readers are on Twitter. Follow them and “listen” for places where technical documentation solves something they’re working on. I wouldn’t suggest that you interrupt conversations as they happen just yet, though. Don’t be the automatic tweeter who says “You were just talking about my company’s software? Check out my company’s help site!” Try to monitor just to get a sense of your readers and who might potentially follow you. After you set up notifications for keywords on search.twitter.com, read through what is being said about either your company, your products, or the subject matter related to your business. Listen, understand the overall sentiment, and then form an idea of who your audience could be. You can’t formulate what you want to say on Twitter until you can hear others first, and understand the flow of information and conversation there.

Play your Part
As a technical communication pro, are you a conversationalist or a guide? On Inc.com you can read about the 8 types of people who belong on Twitter. These types are: personality, guide, brand watchdog, customer support rep, publisher, promotion channel, conversationalist, and finally, the curious.

Only a subset of those types match the job description for most technical communicators. I would suggest customer support representative, guide, conversationalist, the curious and the publisher make sense for technical writers. The brand watchdog and personality considerations may belong in other areas for your company. Your company may already be monitoring and responding to customer support or service requests that come in through Twitter, and you don’t want to over step your bounds into the harshtag area (such as #fail)!

Give More than You Get
Use Twitter posts to link to documentation with longer explanations for a new feature. Basically tweet out the release notes, one feature at a time. Use hash tags to indicate the product name and version. Refer to “Twitter as a medium for release notes“, an experiment by Sarah Maddox, a technical writer with Atlassian. She walks through their process and the results.
Timing and the correct amount of “pause” between posts are relevant decisions here. Do not “flood” a hashtag with tweets about your release notes – readers don’t necessarily want to be overwhelmed with messages.

Be a guide to the overall architecture of your help system by tweeting not just links, but how to find the information they need. Don’t just feed followers, teach them to fish.
Tweet about tutorials on the site and also offer to answer questions about a tutorial.
Be a point of contact for answering questions. If you get stuck, refer to a customer support rep who knows how to properly deflect conflict and answer questions.

Measure
How will you know if your Twitter techniques are working? You should see a steady growth of followers. You want to also monitor the amount of direct messages, @ messages, and general updates you send to gage the right mix of content for the Twitter account. You can measure your responsiveness if you’re in an area like customer support or troubleshooting. You could measure the number of thank yous or appreciative tweets if your goal is to instruct or teach. You can measure the number of retweets or mentions if your role is like a publisher and you want to increase the amount of hits that your content gets. Twitter measurements should tie directly to the goals you have for technical communication.

Try It
Experiment with Twitter for a while and see if there’s a match for your technical communication goals. We’d love to hear how it turns out!

© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.

Focus on Twitter for Technical Documentation

In opinion letters and other rulings, the DOL has set out six ironclad rules for taking on interns. A violation of any of those rules could cost your company in fines and legal fees:

1. There should be actual training involved, similar to what an intern would get at a vocational school. To fully cover the training stipulation, many firms write out detailed training plans, including goals and objectives for the trainee.

2. The training is mainly for the benefit of the trainee, and not just for the company.

3. Trainees do not displace regular employees.

4. The company that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded.

5. There is no agreement or requirement that trainees will receive a job after completion of the training period. That doesn’t preclude companies from hiring trainees; it just means there can’t be a promise of employment before or during the training period.

6. The organization and the trainees understand that the trainees are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training.

Note: Legal advisers suggest that you avoid terms such as “hire,” “job,” “employee” or “employer” in documents associated with an intern program.