So before we have a fall out, have a quick look at this: A Survival Phrasebook on the 5 most commonly used Twitter terms.

1. Tw___.
Yes, thats right tweeps, Twitter pioneers have shown their true geek colours by rebranding old words by the simple device of adding the prefix ‘Tw’ or ‘Twitter’ to any English word that will take it. Examples include:

twitterverse – the sum total of everyone on twitter
twitterati - active users of twitter
tweeple – people
twestival – a twitter organised festival
tweetflash – a breaking news item on twitter

You get the picture. Thankfully, the semantics haven’t changed, only the spelling.

2. RT.
An abbreviation of another twitter coined term, the Retweet. Many people think the real point of Twitter is the ease and speed with which information can become viral. If your update is sufficiently interesting or important, your followers may be inclined to forward it to their followers who in turn may do the same. Within moments your post could be reaching an audience of thousands. ‘RT’ has become the Twitterati’s method of indicating forwarded content – the letters themselves don’t have a technical function (you can forward any tweet without them just as well) so its really a method of attribution, giving credit for the original tweeters tweet, so to speak. It has also come to be used as an appeal to spread the message – significantly used during emergency or disaster situations, such as the Mumbai bombings of 2008 and the Iranian Presidential elections in 2009.

3. # or hashtag.
A user driven agreement to collect tweets on a particular topic to make it easier for people to search for and contribute to a conversation. Agreement is reached simply through hitting a tipping point in usage – users insert the # in front of the topic title and tweet away. If enough people agree to use the hashtag, the topic can ‘trend’ – more about this later. In this way news can spread, almost always faster than traditional distribution channels. Social action (or reaction) can be seen in the #trafigura and #janmoir, where controversial legal and editorial decisions by the oil trading company Trafigura and The Daily Mail led to a widespread outpouring of anger, creating ‘trending’ topics which at one moment had both Trafigura and Jan Moir as the most tweeted about topics worldwide. The negative publicity generated was such that the Trafigura ruling was overturned, whilst the Daily Mail lost most of its online sponsors, with Jan Moir having to post an apology 24 hours later.

4. Trending topics.
A subject of conversation that is popular enough to ranked by Twitter. The subject itself could be anything – a football result, a political summit or the return of Elvis – its the users who decide by tweeting about it. This is the reason why Twitter founder Biz Stone thinks the platform has potential to become a ‘Virtual Water Cooler’ – by tracking trending topics on twitter or 3rd party application like Twitscoop or Trendmaps anyone with an account can swiftly see what people are generally talking about at any point in time, anywhere in the world and contribute to it. It is also a great way to get scoop – trending has proven to be a much faster way of a receiving news – now classic examples include NBA star Shaquille O’Neal’s trade to the Cleveland Cavaliers (Shaq himself found out through a twitter user telling him the deal had been done) and the Continental Airlines 737 crash in Denver when the plane slid off the runway during take-off on Dec 21. Passenger Mike Wilson famously tweeted. “Holy f**king s**t – I was just in a plane crash!”

5. @.
When used in tweets, or in a search, it will look for a user profile rather than the content of that users tweets. For instance, a search on @iran will bring up results of individuals who have the word ‘iran’ in their username, rather than any tweets about the Islamic Republic of Iran. In many respect ‘@’ is the opposite to ‘#’ in the twitterspeak – @ for users, # for content. It is used as a method of attribution and of messaging – the users who’ve been ‘mentioned’ this way can check what is being said about them and who is saying it. For companies and individuals alike, its a great way to monitor brand reputation and even to address customer service issues before they build momentum. Facebook liked it enough to lift the entire concept lock, stock & barrel with its new tagging feature.

And now in Facebook….

And got these replies.

Turns out, he’s absolutely serious and what started as perhaps an ‘off-the-cuff’ idea has become a low cost, high volume, and according to McKay himself, high quality response. Why might this recruitment approach work?

1. He’s the Creative Director of Saatch & Saatchi.
The power of the personal brand is evident. Whilst Mckay himself may not be a business celebrity in the league of a Steve Jobs, he nevertheless works for a globally renowned corporate brand that carries with it a cache by association. It’s probably a fair guess to say that Mike may not have got his response if he instead worked as CD for Hoxton Best Kebab. The lesson for employers is that your senior people need to leverage the power of their brand, especially in the Twitterverse where ‘normal’ people feel like they have the chance to directly communicate with the top guy.

2. He’s pitching to the right audience
Mike only has 634 followers when he tweeted his soon-to-be famous tweet – that’s a pretty low number in the era of auto-follows and automated follower growing software. However, he has received several dozen replies from individuals who appear to be legit candidates. How can this be? Well it demonstrates that numbers are not everything – what matters, is the quality of your following community – real people, who actually are interested in what you have to say. And the people who are following Mike turn out to be advertising executives, content people, editors, and copywriters – in other words, the very audience you might expect the winning applicant might come from. The lesson for employers (& recruiters) here is that you can launch a successful twitter recruitment campaign so long as you are confident that as your audience is the relevant talent community.

3. He’s made is really easy to apply
Read the tweet again. Funniest tweet gets the job. No links to further work, no email to send resume or CV, no request for ID, references or anything of the sort. Want the job? Spend the time it takes to knock out 140 characters on your smart phone. The lesson to employers here transcends social media – make your application strategy simple and low cost for the potential applicant and you will maximise your volume return.