I talk a lot about how to tweet. At conferences, in my book, on this blog, and to any and all small, defenseless babies I come across on the street.

And for good reason, I must say.

If you’re not following me, you really should be. That way, you can study and learn from my good examples.

Case(s) in point:

1)

Today, I had a nice lunch meeting with Petri Darby from the Make a Wish Foundation. After the lunch (in which we ate chai chicken – not thai chicken but chai chicken), I took a picture of him in front of the @Twitter HQ reception sign and he tweeted it out.

I retweeted his tweet.

Then, I sent him a follow up @reply reminding him how much I like the names of his two kids (they are cute and subtly avant-garde, I promise). When I refreshed my @reply stream it said I had a new @reply. Great! I thought. Yay, @darbydarnit has already responded!

And then I saw this useful message…

…from myself.

Yes, I had @replied myself. And then gotten excited about it.

2)

Amazingly, this isn’t the first time in the past week I’ve done something this brilliant on Twitter.

While shooting the promo video for Twitter for Good last week with my publisher Jossey-Bass, they told me to tweet from my phone so they could take some video of the magical moment. I wrote a smart, clever tweet talking about the fact that @jossey-bass was filming me at that moment (how meta!).

It said something like, “Shooting my book pilot with @josseybass #Twitter4Good!” Except, of course, it was really, amazingly, witty and entertaining. *

But when I tried to pull up what I had just tweeted so that the videographer could take a shot of it, I couldn’t find the Tweet in my timeline. Anywhere….But I swore I just tweeted it out…I said (outloud).

And then, I realized I had not sent a Tweet at all. I had sent a direct message. To a coworker (@Trammell). Who likely was really scintillated by my self-promoting update.

Sigh.