So...have you ever made a twitstop?

Do you know how to survive a shelf storm? Have you given into trust lapse?

Customer service expert Pete Blackshaw has compiled some essential vocabulary for a world where life is lived 140 characters at a time. Some of these are more relevant to the US than they are to South Africa — but for a growing minority in this country, social media has assumed central importance. When a tweet about the Fish Hoek shark attack makes the front page of newspapers across the country, and The Sowetan reports that Xhosa traditionalists are unhappy that Zwai Bala’s younger brother tweeted about his initiation, you know that social media is starting to make a real impact in a country where internet access remains out of reach for most of its citizens.

So, without further ado, a list of social media buzzwords for 2010. We’ll kick off with Runway Rebel, which refers to those individuals — we’ve all seen them — who ignore the requests to switch off laptops and cellphones until the last possible moment. I humbly submit that people like this should be beaten over the head with the devices in question.

Then there is the Twitstop:

TWITSTOP: A bathroom detour from a meeting or conversation in order to check email, Twitter or the latest and greatest via an app. (Swear on the Bible, I don’t do this … but I’m told lots of others do.)

Yes, I have used bathroom visits to check mail and Tweetdeck (viva multitasking) — though having an iPhone makes it easy to check for updates no matter where you are. The best way to use a phone in a meeting is to keep it on your lap, below boardroom table level. That way, fewer participants in the meeting can tell you’re actually tweeting. (Failure to pay attention in meetings predates social media, by the way — yonks ago I presented to clients who chuckled over SMSs instead of paying attention, even when I was addressing them directly. I learned all my bad meeting habits from clients.)

If you are going to indulge in Twitstops, be careful not to be caught out Faux Posting.

FAUX POST: When you are talking to someone on the phone and they notice an unrelated tweet or Facebook status update from you showing up in real-time. Bad form — don’t do it. (Trust me!)

It’s very easy to forget that every opinion you express in social media is public. I’m always careful not to pass comment about my real-life dealings with anybody who follows me on Twitter or counts as a Facebook friend.

A blog dodger is a blogger who abandons his or her blog for Twitter or Facebook, which are much lower maintenance and require far less commitment. This is exactly what I have done in the case of my South African Insult blog, which became corrupt (yeah, yeah … no pun intended), making it impossible for me to update it. When it came to maintaining awareness of the latest book, I opted for a Facebook fan page, which might not deliver the numbers, but is much easier to update.

The more you show up in a newsfeed with relevant or entertaining links (which means regularly, but not too often), the more likely you are to ensure that your fans don’t become Brand Teases. A brand tease will become a fan of a brand — often because he or she was invited to by another friend, and to ignore the invitation would be undiplomatic — and then completely forget about it. On Facebook, I am a fan of 69 brands, products, celebrities or organisations, and very few of them ever post any updates at all. So I’m a fan of Eddie Izzard and Iced Zoo biscuits … but so what? South African National Parks is one organisation that makes highly effective use of Facebook’s fan page function.

If you feel compelled to sleep with your Blackberry in case there’s a response to something you tweeted or posted on Facebook, you may be suffering from an Oedipost Complex. Lots of South Africans on Twitter post updates from the moment they wake up until they switch off the lights and go to sleep at night — quite literally. This means that they should seriously consider digital detox. Sometimes, all of this constant connectedness gets too much and one needs some R and R, preferably a long way from a 3G signal.

Until then, regular twitstops will have to do.