Have you had your tweet today?

Twitter is the leading micro blogging site out there, with over 2 million tweeters. This week they hosted the Shorty Awards recognizing the best tweets, messages under 140 characters at an event in NY City. See the winners at: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/12/twitter.shorty.awards/index.html

To comment on James McPherson’s Media & Politics Blog question, “Can a guy who wins a ‘Shorty’ adequately explain in fewer than 140 characters what he won, and why?” I would have to say absolutely, “yes!” Not only in a short and sweet way, but in a jazzy form with sophistication and flair!

Tweeting is definitely a challenge and those 26 shorty winners that were selected by an amazing 50,000 public nomination and votes obviously well deserved it. These 26 winners have mastered the art form of tweeting and are extremely creative individuals.

As a intern for Oddpodz.com that has been newly introduced to Twitter, I have learned a lot from the “big kahuna” major tweeters to the more beginner but, aggressive tweeters with a goal of catching attention and leaving readers begging for more.

Twitter can turn on lots of lights.

Take a Twitterer with mass dedicated followers, Chris Brogan, http://twitter.com/chrisbrogan has over 42,163. The company I work with Oddpodz, blogged about his FREE ebook on personal branding in our FREE Biz Findz. After the post, we shot Chris a note, he tweeted about our site and the post, and within minutes 42,163 of his followers were introduced to Oddpodz. We track where our visitors come from with an incredible FREE tool from Damandbase (Click here for the full entry about it) and we could see hundreds of new visitors from twitter, thanks to the power of a tweet.

Gaining a mass following does not happen overnight. Of the 26 shorty winners, all of them have an extremely large amount of followers including, PeggyOlson, with 11,384, Wendy Leidhecker, with 12,439 followers, and Eric Mueller for entertainment @ FLWbooks with 16,008 followers.

Part of my job as being an intern at Oddpodz.com is tweeting. The art of the tweet is a tough skill. It takes concise communication style to get an intriguing tweet across in 140 characters or less. It is an even tougher challenge to shorten it within 120 characters if you want to add a link with your twitter name to the end for an easy access to retweet. Developing a creative top tweet with personality and individuality takes time and practice. These tips can help: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/02/12/twitter.shorty.awards/index.html

Congratulations Shorty award winners! You deserved it! Follow us, Oddpodz @Oddpodz and Karen aka @Brandingdiva on twitter and join in the fun.

Here’s a great “How-to-Tweet” video.

Shaina Bindeman is an Intern at Oddpodz and a student at University of South Florida where she will graduate this spring 09 with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Business Administration, with a major in marketing. When Shaina’s not working she enjoys professional networking, theater, ballet, modern dance, movies, and fine art. To contact Shaina reach out through the Oddpodz community her user name is sbindema.