We are excited to see you at Church of Twitter tomorrow morning at Ground Zero. If you haven’t registered you might be out of luck.

Please plan to show up early – by 8:30 AM

We only have 100 seats and will start promptly at 9:00 AM.

Below you will find:

1. Agenda
2. How to get from your house to Ground Zero
3 How to park in the right place
4. How to get from your car to to Ground Zero

Agenda:

8:00 to 9:00 – Registration & Refreshments
9:00 to 10:15 – The Basics: Getting Started
10:15 to 10:30 – Break
10:30 to 11:30 – Advanced: Using Twitter For Marketing
11:30 to 11:45 – Break
11:45 to 1:00 – Practice: Practical Examples

How to get from your house to Ground Zero:

View Larger Map

How to park in the right place:

How to get from your car to to Ground Zero:

Thank you to all our awesome sponsors:

From this mornings Wall Street Journal. Great article on how “Tinkering” is making a comeback. I for one am setting up a metal shop in my house…

By JUSTIN LAHART
The American tradition of tinkering — the spark for inventions from the telephone to the Apple computer — is making a comeback, boosted by renewed interest in hands-on work amid the economic crisis and falling prices of high-tech tools and materials.

Click Here to Read

 So I have taken a little bit of time to compile some of the”How-To’s” grow Twitter followers. I have experimented for the last year with a lot of different  ways to do it and I was curios what other people where doing. Here are 3 list that I found that I really liked.

Here is a list from around the web:

From WebStudio13
How to Grow Your Twitter Followers – 5 Ways That Work for Me
by Andrew Ran Wong published September 12, 2009

From Ploked
11 Ways To Grow Your Twitter Following
April 15th, 2009 | ploked

From TechCrunch
Kevin Rose: 10 Ways To Increase Your Twitter Followers
by TechCrunch on January 25, 2009

“What, are you crazy?”

There’s a question that every technology entrepreneur has heard at least once. It’s asked by spouses, families, friends, employees, customers and, yes, investors. When you’re operating on technology’s bleeding edges and trying to introduce that new-to-the-world and must-have tech breakthrough, your sanity will be questioned. It’ll probably questioned repeatedly, too.

What’s even more interesting than the question is how tech entrepreneurs answer it. Are you crazy, Mr. Entrepreneur?

http://wistechnology.com/articles/2018/

The first is about whether you should start a business during this bad economy.
I liked the story because I started The Groop in 2001. And TOOK advantage of the bad economy:

Starting a business in a bad economy
Global Entrepreneurship Week has events in 77 countries. But is now the time to start a business, when the economy is shrinking? Mitchell Hartman finds out.
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/11/18/time_to_launch/

The second is about how the economy and specifically tech will do next year. It posits that because of cash reserves corporations will continue to spend money next year.

HP surprise: Good news in 4th quarter
Hewlett-Packard reports fourth-quarter profits will be stronger than expected. The company is also optimistic about the future. Stacey Vanek-Smith reports.
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/11/18/hp/

Listen to both of these.

First, I am a creative as most of you know. Deciding to start a business makes me a creative entrepreneur.
Not a small club. There are many of you out there. Creatives are not just artist or “visual people”, the word creative describes a lot of people.
If you look at the definition of Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. An alternative conception of creativity is that it is simply the act of making something new. It parallels the definition of Entrepreneurship  “which is is the practice of starting new organizations..” The word “new” is the key. It is not uncommon for us “creatives” to have many, many “new” ideas. It is also not uncommon for us to get excited about the “new“. The “next” thing that attracts us. Some people call it the “shiny object syndrome”. Of all of the fellow entrepreneurs that I know practically all of them (us) suffer from this. Some of us can control the urge to go toward the “new shiny” idea and some of us can’t. There is inherently nothing wrong with “shiny new ideas”, the challenge comes when you can’t focus on completing one idea before you are on to the next. This can have two results: 1. Success 2. Death (of the a business).

How can a creative entrepreneur avoid death by shiny idea and accomplish success? There is no right answer to this question. I can only share my experience, what I know. Though I too suffer from “SOS – Shiny Object Syndrome” I have learned that in order to keep focused I need to have a mission that is greater than me, a reason for doing everything that I am doing that cannot falter when I see a shiny object. This destination is very clear to me, I know what it looks like because I have visualized it, I know what it feels like because I have thought of what i will feel like when I get there, I know who I am during the journey because I have defined it. Without a greater sense of why we are traveling to get to our destination you risk doing what you do for the wrong reasons. Be that money, fame or both. The saying “Do what you love and the money will follow” is not far from the truth. At the center of who you are and what you do is this truth about what it is you do. This truth or essence could be called “Your Brand”. Everything you do should be an expression of this truth, of your brand.
Let me illustrate it using myself as an example. Follow me:
I am a graphic designer, I do interactive design, I am very entrepreneurial, I started and own an interactive design firm, I build web based businesses and online marketing campaigns for clients. I like to teach, I have taught for 10 years, I started an education business to teach creatives and others what I have learned about starting businesses, that business will include online software, etc.  Everything in that progression is in a sequence. A sequence that builds upon itself, one thing after the other.  Like a layer cake. Each new step depends on the last step.

Building my brand has taken time, consistency and hard work. And it is still at it’s infancy. It could have been VERY easy for me to loose sight of the end-game and switched to another “Shiny Object” that came by, but the design firm depends of my design skills my education company depends on the success of the design firm and the software it is building etc. They each buttress each other.

In my next post I am going to talk about creating that mission, that destination, that “brand” that will allow you to take the journey without getting distracted and suffering Death by Shiny Object.