The other day I linked to 11 ways you may be annoying people on Twitter. Today, Brian Solis offers 9 ways to improve your Twitter content.

Now that you’ve read them both, your Twitter feed should be stellar. Go get ‘em.

American Pop is a generally underrated piece of animation that was ahead of its time when it was released in 1981. It attempts, with more success than you might expect, to cram nearly a century of American music history and context into 96 minutes. Here’s the trailer.

Not sure? Here are 11 ways to figure it out.

Mashable likes to present weekend recaps like this one, which presents 40 stories you might have missed.

So here’s my (rhetorical) question to Mashable: Why?

Seriously. It’s Monday morning, I’m gearing up for the week, I have a ton of stuff to do — I can’t ever imagine having the time to read through 40 articles. Instead of dumping 40 articles in my lap, how about giving me the executive summary so I don’t have to read them all?

Links I got. The Mashable recap is just one more drop shooting out of the information firehose. What I really need is topline information to help me make sense of it all.

Just saying.

Takeaway for marketers: Are you adding to the problem or helping to solve it?

Here are 11 quotes for the day, courtesy of Psychology Today, including this one from Washington Irving:

“A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials, heavy and sudden, fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends who rejoice with us in our sunshine, desert us when troubles thicken around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.”

The following list of links crossed my screen this week. It was collectively titled “Social Media Resources and Best Practices.” It’s not the ultimate be-all and end-all list of social media resources, but it’s a damn good collection of links and a great place to start if you’re new to social media. Please to enjoy:

Facebook

The Facebook Guidebook
Facebook for Businesses
Getting Fans to Notice Your Facebook Page Posts
How Facebook Pages Can use “Invite Friends” To Gain Fans
Make the Most of Your Facebook Business Page
Here’s What People Look at on Facebook Brand Pages

Twitter

The Twitter Guide Book
Twitter Business Best Practices
Quick Twitter Tips: A Twitter Guide for Beginners
Ten Tips to get the Twitter Conversation Started

Foursquare

Foursquare for Business
Why You Should Check Out the Foursquare Check-Ins
Why Geolocation App Users Matter to Marketers

YouTube

YouTube for Nonprofits
YouTube Best Practices for Nonprofit Organizations
Five Tips to Socialize Your Online Videos

Flickr

Flickr Tour
The Forgotten Social Network: Six Reasons Your Campaign Should Include Flickr

Pinterest

Pinterest: A Beginner’s Guide to the Hot New Social Network
Three Ways to Use Pinterest for Business
12 Ways to use Pinterest for Your Nonprofit

Tumblr

Get Started with Tumblr
How to Build Your Brand on Tumblr

WordPress

New to WordPress – Where to Start

LinkedIn

Ten LinkedIn Traffic Secrets Exposed

General Social Media Resources

The Case Foundation – Social Media 101
Six Tips for an Effective Online Community
The Secret to Social Media Success
Sample Social Media Tactical Plan
Social Media Policy Tool
Case Study – Cleveland Indians Cater to Influencers to Increase Sales 174%
Five Ways Museums are Reaching Digital Audiences
Four Reasons Why You Should Build a Narrative Organization
QR Code Best Practices
The Real Cost of Social Media
50 Social Media Content Ideas

“Be miserable. Or motivate yourself. Whatever has to be done, it’s always your choice.”
—Dr. Wayne Dyer

Great post from HubSpot.

Takeaway for marketers: Like Nike says, just do it.

Yeah, some days you feel exactly like this. Like today, only I wish it were my laptop, not an old-school printer. Grrrrrr.

I’m not making this up. I promise.

As any writer or editor worth his or her stylebook understands, the phrase “third party” is sometimes used as a noun and sometimes used as a compound adjective.

Noun: “That website is owned by a third party.”

Compound adjective: “That there is a third-party website.”

About as simple as it gets, right?

With all due respect to my daughter, who is finishing up her first year at Villanova law school: not to lawyers, it’s not.

At least not to the lawyers who reviewed the following text:

You are going to a third-party website that [company redacted] does not control. The website is governed by the third party’s posted privacy policy and terms of use, and the third party is solely responsible for the content, offerings and level of security presented on its website.

The lawyers called for the removal of the hyphen in the first sentence.

The writer responded with this: “We’d prefer to abide by the grammatical rule of using a hyphen when two essentially separate words are modifying a noun.”

The lawyer responded: “No objection to leaving the hyphen, but then add the hyphen to all the ‘third party’ references that did not have the hyphen.”

This is the sort of thing that helps give lawyers a bad name.