Many non-profit CEOs or executive directors ask me about the use of Twitter, almost always with a smirk of skepticism. Would people really follow them? Outside the obvious event or fundraiser promotion - what would they tweet? While pushing content out to one's base is important - that's not the way to think about twitter.

It was relatively late in the game that Twitter made perfect sense to me - it's the ideal, no...perfect tool for knowing your customer base, competitors, donors, whatever population you're trying to keep a pulse on. It's not so much about the push (tweeting) as the pull (following). I use twitter daily to keep track of what's going on in several Boston industries - restaurant, education, museums, non-profit - any field where I have clients or wish to have clients. Precisely because of the short length of each message and the relative ease to publish it, people tend to publish thoughts, goals, small daily events that you can't get from following the trades and certainly aren't going to find out at that next mixer.

Select the people, businesses or organizations that you want or need to know and follow them. Not sure who to follow? See who others are following. Soon, you will have a collective pulse of what's going on around town (or further out if you choose) while also being seen as someone who's interested in that business or person....good basic customer relations management.

Quality assurance takes a lot of time in web development. Why is this such an issue? Very simply put - each browser has different settngs built in that support HTML code in different ways. Most currently released browsers support HTML in the same way. However, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6, released in September 2002 and replaced by IE 7 in October 2006 did not support even the most basic web standards - so much so that Microsoft had to create a special hidden tag that we developers add to all web pages. This hidden tag essentially allows us to create a second version of the page just for Internet Explorer - meaning twice the work for the same result...thus higher costs.

Because even Microsoft is soon to stop support for IE 6 (after all they released IE 8 in March 2009) and that it sometimes literally doubles the work, many developers are charging extra to create special code for IE 6 or refusing to support it at all. Frankly, we're struggling with this issue and have opted, for now, to strongly encourage people to upgrade on the sites we develop but not charge a specific "tax" for it....as long as clients understand that some of the cool things they see on the web these days simply won't work at all on IE 6.

We just love this site. Beyond being mesmerizing, it serves as a cool messaging tool at events. Holding an event where monitors are available? Go to Visible Tweets, enter in your twitter name, click full screen and watch people become hooked on reading your organization's tweets. The service also pulls in all mentions of your twitter account adding an even more powerful, and interesting, effect.

Lots of fun and an effective way of getting people to follow you on twitter. http://visibletweets.com