This story originally appeared in PRWeek Insider on 04/18/11 (subscription required).

Two weeks ago a Marc Jacobs intern publicly melted down on Twitter and then quit. Two weeks before that, Chrysler experienced some Twitter road rage, and an agency was fired. And two weeks before that, the Red Cross had to confiscate the keys from their tweeter for #gettngslizzerd.

Imagine if these accidents had happened in a healthcare setting? We don’t need FDA guidelines to understand the hot water we’d be in.

Pharma company Twitter feeds are heavily stage-managed. Posts are vetted by an army of regulatory and legal staff, and updates are timed like Obama’s inauguration. The few branded Twitter feeds are even more tightly controlled. But who tweets and how? It’s usually a junior staffer copying and pasting the approved post and frequently using their own choice of software. That’s the weak link. The examples at the beginning are a cautionary tale of people inadvertently mixing their personal and professional profiles, and of tweeters going off the rails.

Software Rx: Twitter feeds are frequently handled using a dashboard like Hootsuite which can manage a number of feeds at once and offers analytic capabilities for tracking tweets and mentions. It can handle Facebook pages as well, enabling you to easily syndicate content selectively across the social platforms. Even multiple clients can be set up. The lure is strong to add your personal accounts, and create a mothership dashboard so you can be complete master of your domain. Resist it, it’s a bad idea. It’s all too easy to click the wrong icon and post to the wrong account – especially late at night or in a busy airport. One wrong click and you blast your personal tweet about that new band to your client’s followers. Or, you might post that handbag website to your client’s Facebook page. Amusing, yes, but it’s not as funny the next morning.

The best practice is to create separate dashboards for work and personal accounts using different email addresses and logins. Then using themes, give them radically different colors and backgrounds so you can easily distinguish between them, no matter how flummoxed you might be. For added safety, consider using different browsers, like Chrome for work and Firefox for personal.

Mobile Rx: The same goes for mobile devices. For tweeting on the go, use a different mobile app for your clients and personal tweets. Put them on different pages or folders. Don’t tweet and drive.

Content Rx: If you’re tweeting for a pharma company or brand, your hands are already tied and the blinders are on, just carefully press ‘send,’ per the above. If you’re fortunate enough to be tweeting for a hospital or association in a less structured way, you need to have some guidelines for the voice of your feed. You are the spokesperson of the brand, and while you want personality and authenticity, behave as if your every tweet could be on the cover of USA Today, because if you screw up, it will be. Consider using a workflow where tweets are approved before they are issued.

So take your medicine and tweet me in the morning @markhdavis.

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Right on the heels of the Middle East unrest came the Great Tohoku Kanto Earthquake that rocked northern Japan. Again Social Media played a large role. Survivors used Twitter to contact relatives, Facebook to organize search parties, and Google Maps to organize emergency response. Right after the quake, tweets were being sent at a rate of 1,200 per hour.

The sudden burst of tweets about the disaster made it difficult to distinguish between those on location and those interested in helping. Wouldn’t it be useful if there were a separate convention for tweets from witnesses to major events versus those just involved in the discussion?  How about #jpquake! for witnesses and #jpquake for discussion?

This idea or using a bang (!) or other special character to separate those on the scene from the rest of the crowd seems to have emerged from a number of simultaneous sources. Apparently it was discussed on a panel at SXSW (otherwise know as Spring Break for Geeks) which was taking place right at the same time as the earthquake. I saw it mentioned on TV by a startup wizard whose name I don’t remember. However, it doesn’t seem to have taken hold as a common practice yet – perhaps the next political or natural disaster will bring it up again.

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We social media advocates sit in our offices and Starbucks discussing new options and how they affect the brands and companies we work with. Then, those mundane marketing uses go out the window when you see events transpiring on the world stage that really illustrate the incredible power of these new media. We glibly talk about the Social Media Revolution and suddenly real revolutions are happening.

Just this week, CNN reported that an Egyptian man named his newborn daughter “Facebook” in honor of the role the social media network played in bringing about a revolution. Amazing, and emblematic of the role the network played in the recent events there. (And probably a name that’s going to bring about some schoolyard teasing.)

Shortly after Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down from power, Google employee and activist Wael Ghonim spoke with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and credited Facebook with the success of the Egyptian people’s uprising. What’s interesting here is that there was no central charismatic leader in the mix – the revolution was crowd-sourced.

Facebook executives took unusual steps to protect the identity of protest leaders during the Egypt uprising. The Daily Beast reported on how the social media giant scrambled to keep pace with Egypt’s revolution. Despite all efforts by the government, the size and speed of Facebook and Twitter were impossible to shut down.

There was talk about how: “Twitter and Facebook are shields against future genocides. Like new antibodies in the body of humanity.” But many commentators noted that these technologies are enabling, but politically neutral. So, they could as easily be used for suppression, as for liberation.

One of the first things the Egyptian military did after President Hosni Mubarek resigned was create a Facebook page. That’s pretty telling.

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I’m now commuting daily into Manhattan and taking my iPad. When you commute, its amazing how a bag which you hardly even noticed carrying getting out of the car, feels like it weights a hundred pounds by the time you get to the office.

So, I wondered, how far could I go being paperless and reducing everything I carry down to that iPad? Could my new hobby be reducing my carbon footprint?

It turns out I could go all the way. The iPad itself pretty much takes care of books. How about work files? For the most part, I want to review documents on the train, not write something complex. That means I could use PDFs. Creating PDFs is no problem, and the iPad reads them pretty well on it’s own. However, I found an app called Goodreader that is absolutely amazing. Not only does it open even enormous PDFs, it let’s you highlight, annotate, and draw! It will also let you open other files, like PowerPoints, either in the reader itself or in a different app like Keynote.

So how do you get the files on the iPad? I did a lot of experimenting on this. There are slow, clunky ways, like using iTunes. However, there are also extremely frictionless ways using wireless. I turned to the cloud.

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably familiar with the expression “Cloud Computing.” if not, you will be soon. The term refers to storing data or accessing application “in the cloud” on the Internet where it can be accessed from anywhere, rather than locally on a PC, laptop, or iPad. The cloud and the iPad are like peanut butter and jelly – made for each other.

I had heard about Dropbox, which gives you 2 free gigs of cloud storage, but I had never used it. It’s unbelievably smooth. It behaves just like any other  folder you have on your computer. Drop files in and almost instantaneously they are available anywhere.  When you use it the same files are available at home on your laptop or on your iPad. No USB drives required!

Dropbox has its own iPad app, but it’s even better used with Goodreader. You just open up Goodreader and pull what you need down from the cloud. You can make changes and send it back up to Dropbox as well.

Similarly, I’m in love with Evernote. Evernote is also cloud based. It allows you to capture almost anything: notes, pictures, web pages, screenshots, etc. Additionally, you can easily work on it when you’re not on the Internet.  It is my primary tool for note taking. When you connect again everything gets synced. For example, I copied the train schedule into it and it’s now on my iPad and smartphone. Springpad is a new app that is similar and also has some project planning features. I wrote this blog post on it.

My last new favorite is Instapaper. Instapaper is a simple tool to save web pages for reading later. It’s great for scanning through those web articles you don’t have time to read at your desk.

A big advantage to the cloud based approach is that most of these applications are available on your iPhone and PC/Mac as well. And all of your data is now backed up in the cloud.

I tried out a lot of other apps and combinations to get to this point. I’ve been using this combo for a couple of months and I’m happy with it. The app store is like a candy store, and for $5 – beer money – you can get amazing pieces of software.  It probably has reduced my carbon footprint – though not enough to offset my commute.

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Last August the camera in my iPhone 3GS started producing photos as if they were taken through a jar of Vaseline or a screen door – neither one a very pleasing effect. It didn’t inconvenience me much, but I do find the camera handy for a quick informal shot or as a reminder for something I need to remember, so I missed it.

I went online and found that the camera lens has a protective coating and that sometimes it produces the problem I had. I tried every remedy from rubbing alcohol to lens cleaners but nothing worked.

I made an appointment at the ‘Genius Bar’ at the Apple Store in Short Hills, but I missed the appointment by 5 minutes. If you are late you’re cooked and have to wait for the next opening – in that case 3 hours. Bye, bye, Short Hills.

I finally got around to making another appointment in late October. I was determined to get there early (a personal first for me) and I did. I showed up to the genius bar and showed the resident genius my problem. Clearly something was wrong with the phone, so he disappeared into the secret back room. I waited…and waited some more. He showed up with a new phone! (Ok, refurbished.). Now that’s great customer service – delight the customer. Even though my phone was two months out of warranty, they replaced the whole phone to fix the camera.

I’d forgotten how useful it was to have a camera. Many stores this holiday season have QR codes on their price tags and I’d be sunk without camera to scan them. I can fool around with fun tools like Hipstamatic (photo above) and Instagram. And if a flasher ever bothers me, I can catch them in the act.

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