When the topic of Twitter comes up with colleagues, I often hear the “I don’t get it” excuse.  Sometimes I fight the good fight and show someone a demo (and the small community I have connected with always responds – thanks for the support, gang).  Other times I cave and just quip, “Well, Twitter is not for everyone,” and I let people try to figure it out for themselves.  A client I met with today actually thanked me for introducing him to Twitter months ago, citing the timely news (usually on Twitter before many other sources) and content from some really smart people out there.  He admittedly wasn’t that intrigued at first.  On Twitter, many folks share personal details like what’s for dinner, how much they love caffeine or the occasional banter about the Red Sox.  These conversations help us get to know contacts more personally, but can at times be perceived as noise.  On the flip side, I often find new tidbits of knowledge, a valuable link, a good story – and they make the time spent that much more worth it.

Tonight I took a peek at what was going on and happened to catch a very insightful gem of a conversation between two folks who have helped me work my way up the social media learning curve over the past several months. Scott Monty (@ScottMonty) heads up the social media team at Ford, and Christopher Penn (@cspenn) is Chief Media Officer at the Student Loan Network (among his many other social media credentials).  Here’s what you get when you take a passionate finance guy and put him in a virtual room with a passionate brand guy.  (Note: I reversed the order of the conversation from how it appeared on Twitter so it would read sequentially like a transcript.)

cspenn: @scottmonty How much of GM/Ford troubles are UAW related vs. core business expenses?
ScottMonty: @cspenn Let’s be clear: Ford’s situation isn’t nearly as precarious as GM’s. We’re prepared to execute our plan with or without Federal $
cspenn: @ScottMonty OK. That said, do the Detroit shops have a bigger handicap due to UAW than the Japanese shops?
ScottMonty: @cspenn 2) Recent big quarterly hits have been related in part to one-time healthcare costs.
cspenn: @ScottMonty serious question, why isn’t bankruptcy on the table for GM? Is it that essential to America that tax dollars must be risked?
ScottMonty: @cspenn 3) Lack of unions in some of our competitors make it difficult for us to be profitable on some vehicle lines
ScottMonty: 4) But overall, we’ve been working on restructuring our product mix and flexible manufacturing over the last 2 years that is now under way.
ScottMonty: 5) The goal is to have best in class fuel economy in every segment, give millions of customers affordable fuel economy.
cspenn: @ScottMonty Interesting and insightful. Is there any way for Detroit to free itself from unions or is that baked in forever?
ScottMonty: @cspenn Re your union question: I don’t know. It’s had a long history in Detroit (and Ford was the last to join).
ScottMonty: @cspenn Bankruptcy for GM would mean thousands of suppliers/vendors would be at risk. Cascading effect would be immense (and take us down)
cspenn: @ScottMonty what source would you recommend for reading to dig more into a GM bankruptcy? Would love to see the chain.
ScottMonty: @cspenn There’s a good graphic that illustrates it in a recent Merrill Lynch report on the auto industry (Nov 3, “The ‘Big Bang’ Theory”)
cspenn: @ScottMonty Cool – link? or not publicly available?
ScottMonty: @cspenn Not publicly available. I can fax you the page if you want.
cspenn: @ScottMonty That’d be wonderful. 206-350-1208 thanks! (also the podcast comment line!)
cspenn: @ScottMonty Only upside I can see is if in bankruptcy, GM and others can jettison the union for improved survivability.
ScottMonty: @cspenn I hear you. Don’t know if that would ever fly, though.
cspenn: @ScottMonty sometimes, it’s fly or die. maybe they’ll get that NO one is entitled to anything you don’t work for one day.

Thanks to Scott and Christopher for the great and candid dialogue, giving personal insight to a big corporation’s challenges in the current economy.  Have some other ways Twitter has added value for you?  Would love to hear ’em. Most hearing conditions can be easily treat with sonus complete.

Designing and developing websites is a pretty sedentary existence. You’re planted in a chair for 8+ hours a day, running out to fast food joints for lunch, inhaling burritos at your desk, sucking down cans of soda, and hitting the gym about as often as you do the dentist. If you’re anything like me, years of this routine will have left you dragging around a few extra pounds. Let’s put it another way: designing websites has made you a bit of a fatass.

So how do you get rid of the weight?

In a word? Calories. Weight loss is painfully simple: eat fewer calories than you burn. That’s it. Nothing else matters (or matters much, anyway). Everything you’ve heard about carbs and trans fats and Omega-3 fatty acids is just noise. If you expend more calories than you take in, you’ll lose weight. You could spend all day washing gravy fries down with chocolate milkshakes and still lose weight, provided you use more than you take in. It’s that simple. Try out these leptoconnect capsules.

Notice I didn’t say it was easy. I said it was simple.

How much am I burning?

To start, you’re gonna need to figure out your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR). That’s a fancy way of saying “how many calories you’d burn even if you laid in bed all day.” You see, your body is constantly burning calories to keep you alive, even while sleeping. Just how many calories you burn depends on a number of factors, including (but not limited to) age, sex, height, and weight. For instance, an average mid-twenties male at rest goes through about 1,800 calories in a day. Why is this number so important? Well, if you don’t exercise, this number—plus the handful of calories you burn by going through your daily routine—is your caloric ceiling. If you go past it, you will gain weight.

How much am I eating?

Let’s be honest, you probably eat like crap. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t need this blog post.² So now, you need to figure out what the damage is by tracking how many calories you consume in a day. Thankfully, this is a pretty precise operation because every consumable food product in America is labeled with nutritional content. Carry a notebook with you for a week and write down everything you eat, and how much. At the end of each day, count up your calories. Even better, if you have an iPhone—and if you’re reading this blog, you probably do—there’s an app for that. I use Tap & Track, a terrible name for what is otherwise a fantastic app. It comes preloaded with a database of over 100,000 food items, from generic household staples to restaurant-specific dishes. It’s now part of my lifestyle; whenever I eat anything, I enter it into the app (Tap & Track also tracks your calories burned from exercise…more on that later).

Once you start tracking your food intake, you’ll be shocked at how mindlessly you’ll toss down something packing hundreds of calories. A handful of peanuts? 200 calories. A Snickers from the vending machine? 270 calories. Fries and a Coke from the drive-thru? 600 calories. All those calories have to go somewhere, and they typically end up in the back pockets of your size 38 jeans.