Love Twitter?

Love Mad Men?

Whichever it is, tune into the WordCount Last Wednesday live chat tomorrow for a chance to meet the award-winning tweeter behind the @Peggy Olson Twitter account.

That would be Carri Bugbee, a Portland, Oregon, social media, marketing and public relations executive who took home a 2009 Shorty Award for anonymously tweeting as Olson.

Bugbee will lead a chat on how writers and bloggers can use Twitter to crowdsource and promote their work. She’ll also discuss some of the best Twitter apps for writers.

The one-hour chat takes place on Twitter at 8:30 a.m. Pacific time.  To follow along, use the hashtag #wclw.

The format of tomorrow’s live chat is as follows:

• 8:30 – Log on, introduce yourself with your name, city, type of writing you do and what Twitter-related topics you’d like the chat to cover.
• 8:35 to 8:40 – I’ll ask Carri a few questions to get things rolling.
• 9 a.m. – We’ll open it up to questions from the audience.
• 9:30 a.m. – The chat ends.

Although it’s possible to use the standard Twitter interface for a live chat, you might find it easier to follow along with an add-on application such as TweetGrid, TweetChat or HootSuite. This tutorial explains how to set them up.

If you’re afraid you’ll offend followers by tweeting too much during a chat, you can suggest they use an app called TwitterSnooze to temporarily turn off your tweets. In case you haven’t done this before, when the chat starts, tweet a message like this: “I’ll be in a live chat for the next hour; if you don’t want to follow, turn off my tweets with TwitterSnooze.com.”

Coming attractions

Stay tuned for more on tech tools for writers and running a writing business in coming months. Here’s what you can expect on the next few upcoming WordCount Last Wednesdays:

• August 25 – Using an e-newsletter to promote your business, with Susan Weiner, writer-editor, chartered financial analyst (CFA), blogger and author of a long-running monthly e-newsletter on investment and wealth management.
• September 29 – Facebook fan pages for fun and profit, with Tricia Lawrence, writer, blogger, social media strategist and instructor of an upcoming Writer’s Digest University class on social media strategy for authors.
• October 27 – Creating and marketing your self-published ebook, with Susan Johnson, writer, blogger at The Urban Museand author of the new ebook, The Urban Muse Guide to Online Writing Markets.

If you’ve got a suggestion for a subject you’d like to see covered, send it my way.

If you’re an expert in a particular aspect of freelance writing, running a freelance business or tech tools for writers and are interested in participating as a guest speaker, contact me.

It seems  the wife of Sir John Sawers, next in line to run England’s super-secret spy agency MI6, had been using Facebook to share pictures of her husband and family and post updates on their whereabouts – not the kind of behavior covert operatives normally go in for.

As you can imagine, the British tabloids are having a field day, though as one British government official put it, how important to national security can it be to know Sawer wears Speedos.

But the incident points up the potential trouble of using social networks.

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn have gone out of their way to make it easy to update your status, so the world can know “What are you doing now?”

That’s a great way to keep colleagues and potential business partners apprised of your blog posts, projects, business ventures, convention stops or speaking engagements. But it’s also easy to end up mixing your business life with your personal life. In fact, social media gurus encourage you to devote a small portion of what you share on Twitter or blogs to real-life stuff, the better to make you sound human, not just a robo-pitchman for whatever it is you do or sell.

But as Mrs. Sawers found out, mixing things up can lead to trouble. So can providing so much about your business life you end up sharing details better left unsaid.

Major news media outlets have begun addressing this issue by crafting social media policies that, among other things, spell out what their writers can and can’t do on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The Wall Street Journal published guidelines in May with requirements that, among other things, reporters should avoid discussing articles before they’re published, meetings they’ve attended and “friending” potentially confidential sources.

Freelance writers aren’t normally beholden to a client’s social media usage requirments – unless they’re written into a contract, which is something I have yet to see.

So it’s up to you to decide what you should and shouldn’t share. Some suggestions:

* Don’t share specifics of an assignment. Crowdsourcing has become a popular for finding story sources, but there’s a way to share the general nature of what you’ll be writing about without giving everything away. When in doubt, err on the side of caution.

* Remember everything you say online could be there forever. In the heat of the moment you may feel like sharing the ugly details of an assignment gone wrong, names and all. But in an industry where editors and writers move around almost monthly, so much openness can come back to haunt you. If you simply must vent, call a trusted friend, or use the writers’ message board you subscribe to, but consider not actually naming names.

* Use some social networks for work and some for fun. Some writers use Twitter and LinkedIn for work and Facebook for fun, so they can shield all of the personal stuff they share about their families, vacations and leisure activities from the potentially prying eyes of editors, readers and other nosy types. If this is how you want to roll, use the appropriate Facebook settings to keep your info private, and don’t feel bad about saying “No thanks” when business associates ask to connect with you there and redirect them to the networks you use for business.

If you’re on social networks, how do you keep your business and private lives separated?