A lot of you probably don’t know this, but my internet handle is mroconnell.  Like Mister O’Connell.  This is an old nickname that goes back to when I was a teenager.  A lot of my friends teased me for acting like an 80 year old man so often.  I had business meetings, taxes, crazy stories about my adventurous youth, and I had a tendency to fall asleep really early.

🙂

So shortly after discovering that Google released GMail and Odeo released Twitter, I was there with my handle “mroconnell“.  In some ways, it was a crappy choice. Most people don’t read it as MISTER and that makes it hard to remember.  A lot of people type oconnell with one L.  Anyway, I could have made a better choice.  But I don’t mind it horribly.  And it would be silly to try to start a new account now that I’ve entered the community as mroconnell.

So what do I do about all the mistypes?  Well I have two suggestions.

Get additional twitter names.  It costs just a couple minutes to expand your Twitter realestate.  Just make a new account and claim the name with the typo.  I just started up @mroconnel where I can politely redirect folks to the correct spelling.  If people consistently mistype your name on twitter, try to reserve the alternate spellings.

The second bit of advice is to post your twitter name clearly in places that people might look for it.    I used to have a link on this page that said Tweeeet.  While humorous, it was pretty inconvenient for folks who wanted to find my twitter name.  They had to see that link and click it.  I’ve now replaced it with a @mroconnell which is much more recognizable to twitter users.  Saving them some precious seconds and also catching their eyes more easily.  Or so I hope.

I guess my point is that you don’t need to have a PERFECT twitter name.  But you should try to make life easy for people who want to talk to you on twitter.  That goes for any site you’re fond of.