In Twitter if you change your handle, all links that relate to your old handle will be broken (and there could be thousands of them if you’d been on the network for awhile). If someone actually clicked on a link or tried to direct message or @reply to your old handle, they’d see a message like this:

Also all your followers would need to be notified of the change, which could be a magnanimous task considering that you’d probably have to message each person individually. I resonated with this sentiment as when I look back now, I really feel like I made a branding mistake with my handle. Every time you post something hundreds of people’s eyes are scanning past your name and with that repeat attention, if you have something valuable to say and give, you will reap positive benefits and having those connected to your name can be very beneficial for you.

When I joined Twitter 3 weeks ago I really didn’t understand that. I thought Twitter was pretty much a narcissistic bunch of people who had a bit too much time on their hands who were compelled to share all the intimate details of their lives with the world. I’d seen status updates on Facebook over the last couple of years and have to admit they definitely added noise to the dashboard… “hmm, should I go with the sundried tomato or red pepper cream cheese on my sesame seed bagel?” What the… ? Besides superstar celebs, does anyone really care what us ‘lowly’ people are doing right now?

My thinking however started to change, when I received an email newsletter from my friend Mhairi Petrovic from Out-Smarts Marketing and she’d mentioned that her second largest stream of  business had come from Twitter, so I was a bit confused as how you could gain business from people doing glorified Facebook status updates, but hey there was a recession at hand so it definitely caught my attention. The next day I was reading a post by one of my favorite bloggers Eric Karjaluoto from ideas on ideas who’d expressed his opinion on why he thinks Twitter is going to die and somehow his insights on his experiences on Twitter got my curiosity up enough to make me decide to take the plunge and find out what all the buzz was about. 

I really didn’t put much thought into my handle when I started. My former Hotmail address was canucksfan82 so I figured that was an option. It had a lot of personal sentiment because of my love of the Canucks and because 1982 was the year when I became a diehard fan when they went all the way to the Stanley Cup finals so I went with it. However in a very short time I’ve come to regret that decision. I’ve come to realize that there’s a lot more to Twitter than just blurting out your whereabouts. It’s actually a tremendous tool for helping you expand both your personal and corporate brand. I will be writing more on this in future posts, however for now let’s stick to the handle and how I’ve made the switch. 

Steps to Changes Your Twitter Handle:

1. Pick a new handle that will work best for the brand that you want to create. Check out Hubspots’s Twitter Handles Dos and Don’ts and Strategy for Creating a Twitter Handle for input on this. 

2. Log into your Twitter account and click on “Settings”.

3. Enter your new handle into the “username” field and then wait for Twitter to check for the availability of that username. If it’s not available then you may need to try your second or third choice. 

4. As soon as you find your choice available, then enter your “Password” (in the grey box that should have appeared below) and then click on “Save”.

5. Immediately “Sign Out” of Twitter and then sign up for a new Twitter account by clicking on the “Get Started – Join” button. 

6. During the setup of your new account make sure to use the OLD handle that you were using in your main account. 

Once that’s done you’ll now have 2 accounts. Your main account will have your new handle (ie. @glennhilton) and will have retained all your followers. Your new account will have your old handle (ie @canuckfan82) and you can use that account if you want for a secondary purpose or to retain it to catch any direct messages or @replies that your followers or others may respond to. You can then get back to them from your main account and give a notification of the change. I also suggest making a clear statement in the bio of your new account, that your main account has moved. This is especially helpful for new people who may come across your account and want to follow you as it will send them on to your new account saving you both time in you not having to get back to them to notify them personally, and them having to later waste time in changing the account they want to follow. I actually added a note in all caps in the bio of my new account that says in “I’VE MOVED MY MAIN TWITTER ACCOUNT TO @glennhilton” to try and make things pretty clear for newbies.

Does any of this sound confusing? It actually shouldn’t be as it’s a pretty simple change. And it’s fairly easy to manage after you make the switch too. There’s a number of apps you can use to track multiple accounts. I actually use Hootsuite (an online Twitter app) and  Tweetie (which is the best Twitter app I’ve found for the iPhone) to track personal and business accounts in one place.

And as you’ve probably figured out, I decided to keep my @canuckfan82 as a place to talk hockey with my hockey loving friends. This was actually a suggestion from Jenn Lowther during a chat after the panel discussion yesterday and it made good sense to me. The benefits of this is that I don’t have to create hockey noise for your other followers who may not be interested in hearing about the latest trade rumor or predictions on tonight’s game. A week ago I actually had one follower do a public @reply to say “Oh shut up about Canucks!”. Now to be honest the individual was actually one of my old college buddies and he was probably hamming it up a bit for fun but it did get me thinking as really there are so many spheres of interest on Twitter that if you get talking on one channel too much you can definitely create clutter on other channels. So it might be something you’ll want to consider. 

1. Charge Daily – Each night I’ve gotten into the habit of plugging my iPhone charger into my upstairs computer that’s placed conveniently just steps from my bed so I won’t forget. Often I’ve thought “oh, I have plenty of power, I’m sure it will last thru the day tomorrow”, but like the parable of the 10 poor virgins who didn’t come prepared, I’ve often had situations where I needed my iPhone more than I thought, so now I make sure to do it religiously whether I think I need to or not.

2. Optimize your Settings – I’ve optimized my iPhones settings based on some of the tips in How to Maximize Your iPhone Battery Life and 10 Tips to Conserve iPhone Battery Life.

You may not want to follow all these steps, but I’ve noticed a huge difference in how long my battery’s lasted after implementing most of them.

3. Make Sure You’re Prepared for the Worst – I’ve purchased a separate iPhone power adapter that I keep in my Laptop case and take it with me everywhere. I also purchased a cigarette power adapter so that if I’m ever low on batteries in the car, I can always plug it in to replenish it.

Since following these steps I’ve only ran out of power once, and that was a day when I must not have secured the power adapter to my iPhone properly and unfortunately didn’t get a charge at all, but fortunately I did have my power adapter so I just found the closest wall plug and was good in no time.

1. Copy the URL of the video on YouTube:

ie. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOTpIVxji8

2. Add youtube= immediate before the URL.

3. Put the entire URL inside square brackets.

3. Copy and paste the new bracketed URL into your post and then it should look like this:

Nira Arora had used it for her WTF spot. She thought it was hilarious that a guy would cry over a library getting shut down. She got maligned a bit after that for finding humor in someone’s sorrow. lol. I have to admit I too found it quite amusing, however I can relate as there’s been many occasions where I’ve publically cried over stuff and was like, where did that come from. I felt bad for Sugar on this last round of Survivor as she was like a watershed waiting to burst as she was on the verge of tears in the most tame situations. She later explained that actually it was a lot of pent up emotions that were in side due to the death of her father whom she admired so much. That made a lot of sense to me as I realized that I too have a lot of emotion inside due to disappointments or hurt in the past and whenever I get into situations that can trigger this, it just comes out. It’s a bit embarrassing at times though, which is why I feel a bit for this guy as wow, he had the camera in his face at just the wrong time. 

Watching this made me really feel for this woman and what she must have been going thru as it brought a wave of memories back to me of a time when I was just a young-in and had a similar experience with someone that I loved who completely changed in how he related to me. That person was my grandpa. My grandpa and I had always been fairly close. My siblings and I used to go over to our grandparents house to stay and I’d so look forward to that time as we didn’t have a TV at our home growing up, so when I’d come over, grandpa would alway spoil us and let us watch whatever we wanted. I especially loved to sit down and watch Canucks hockey games with him and enjoyed it as he’d holler at the TV set as if they could actually hear him. But as grandpa grew older his mind started to go on him and so my parents decided that he should move into our house with us. At first everything went alright but then suddenly my grandpa started seeing anyone who was a male to be a threat (except for my dad). And being that I was the only other male in the house at the time he began to act very hostile towards me. One day he was in the bathroom taking care of my little niece (who was in the bathtub) and I came into the room to see how they were doing and he got this really scary look in his eye and I saw his eyes dart around and then he reached for the closest object, which was a electric razor, and he tried to hit me over the head with it. I dodged his swing and ran out of the bathroom and was quite upset. Why was my grandpa trying to hit me? A couple days later I got up one morning to come down for breakfast and walked into the kitchen and saw my grandpa sitting at the table so I tried to be cheery and wished him a good morning. Well that set him off again, he leapt up and found the closest thing he could find, which was a jug of orange juice and hurled it at me. Again I was quite troubled about the experience but my grandma told me that he really did love me, but that he was just going senile which meant that he wasn’t thinking straight. A few days after that I came outside into our carport to get something from our car for my mom and my grandpa was out there. I saw the look in his eye and knew that he had ill intent. He attacked me again and I tried to hold him off, but I knew that he really wanted to harm me. I pushed him away to try to get away but unfortunately my push caused him to lose his balance and he fell back and struck his head on the concrete. I’ll never forget what that felt like to see my grandpa who I loved lying there on the ground with blood coming out of the back of his head because of what I’d done. I ran and found my mom and we got grandpa to the hospital and thankfully he was ok. Soon after that grandpa’s conditioned worsened. The last day I ever saw him, I came in to visit him in the hospital room and the second he saw me he got that wild look in his eye again and reached for the closest thing to him, which was his tube of toothpaste on the table beside him and hurled it at me. Grandpa passed away that next day, and I remember as just a young teen how much it hurt at the time to wonder what had gone wrong and why my grandpa wanted to hurt me so much. 

Looking back on it now I realize that he really did love me and that he never would have wanted to harm me but that something did go wrong with his mind. So now I just try and think of the good things about my grandpa. The warm memories I have of him at Christmas time around the tree, or the funny prayers he’d make at the dinner table to humor my parents, or being able to go somewhere in the car with him and see how much he’d piss off my grandma with his crazy driving habits.

When I think of that woman today who went thru that horrific experience with her pet chimp, my heart goes out to her as I know she probably is feeling a tremendous amount of guilt and I in no way understand what that would be like, as her situation was tenfold of my own. I’m sure she’s feeling devastated and somewhat responsible for harm done to her friend. But I do hope that when the rash of media craze has past and she has time to reflect that she will be able to remember the many good years she had with her good friend and with her pet chimp and that the situation was in no way her fault as what happened was totally out of her control and caused by circumstances that we may never be able to fully understand.