Twitter is an acquired taste, just like olives, but it took a ranking system called Klout, a measure of online influence, to really turn me on to it. 

Klout provides an accurate and sensitive barometer using a scale of 1 to 100, and it responds to any changes in your online behavior almost immediately.

It has become extremely popular, and many social media professionals will ask you about your Klout score in the same way others might inquire about what you do for a living.

In order to improve your Klout score in an efficient manner, you will need a program like Social Oomph so you can schedule your tweets in one sitting and then proceed with the rest of your day uninterrupted.

As I started engaging with other people through @mentions, also to improve my Klout score, a funny thing happened. My communications assumed an edgy quality quite unlike any emails. I attribute two reasons to this.  

PR professionals must often manipulate images in today's multi-discipline world, but you can avoid buying expensive programs such as Photoshop when Paint.net offers a free, user-friendly and powerful capability.

After downloading the program from www.getpaint.net, you can use it easily for two basic needs: re-sizing and cropping.

For cropping, after clicking on "file, open" in the top menu bar to retrieve your image, you can then select "image, canvas size," also from the top nav bar. A new option box will appear.

Then, it's simple. If you choose "bottom" from the pull-down menu in the "anchor" section, and change the number of pixels shown for the height, you will crop out a corresponding amount from the top of the photo. Similarly, if you choose "left" in the anchor section, and change the pixel number for the width, the right side of the photo will be trimmed.