Home How It Works For Newbies Terms & Conditions Today's Featured Special Issue Tag #s1686 Pass the Justice Act More Special Tags General Issue Tags #abortion #adoption #afghanistan #agriculture #appointment #art #bailout #bank #budget #business #children #consumer #corporation #crime #defense #disability #drug #economy #education #efca #election #employment #energy #environment #ethics #farm #fcc #fema #finance #foreign #gas #gay #government #gun #health, hcr #hiv #housing #icc #interior #internet #immigration #impeach #iran #iraq #israel #judge #justice #labor #marriage #medicare #mortgage #nasa #native #oil #palestinian #pension #privacy #publicoption #religion, #religious #retirement #rights #sba #science #singlepayer #solar #ssa #student #tax #telecom #torture #trade #transportation #unemployment #union #veteran #vote, #voting #war #welfare #wiretap #women You can capitalize any part of these words to taste. Where the singular is given above, the plural will match as well. If nothing else seems like a close issue match, then you can use #government. Help Tags *help *login *security Please note: all the help tags begin with an asterisk (*), NOT a number sign (#). For example, if you send a reply to @cxs including *login in the message, we will send a new private, direct message with a fresh, encrypted login link. The New Twitter Response Option Step By Step And now, for Newbies, and those who have requested a more detailed explanation, here is exactly how you set up and use the new Twitter action alert response option, step by step. 1) First, you must have an account with Twitter of course. If not, go to http://twitter.com and click on the light green "Join" button. Pick a name to use as your Twitter username (the form will tell you if your selection is available) and pick a password to use for logging into your Twitter homepage. Enter also your email address and your name and submit the form. You are now logged into your Twitter home page. 2) Once you are logged into Twitter, go to http://twitter.com/cxs and click on the gray "Follow" button under the pic of the Capitol dome in the upper left. You are now a follower of @cxs, which is our gateway to send your messages to Congress. 3) Now go back to your Twitter homepage, and within a couple minutes of becoming a follower of @cxs you will get a Twitter direct message from us. Look in the light green bar on the right side of your Twitter home page to access your direct messages inbox. 4) In that direct message you will find a link that will automatically log you into our contact info setup page back on this site. Enter your contact info, just like you would on one of our regular action pages and submit the form. You will only have to do this one time. 5) Now go back to your Twitter home page and from now on all you have to do to send your messages to Congress is FIRST to type @cxs in the update status box at the top and then type a space. You will see the "What are your doing?" line at the top change to "Reply to cxs", and the grey button labeled "update" will change to "reply". Now type in the required issue tag of your choice, in the case of the issue in this alert #p1016, plus any additional comment you might like to add, and you can send your reply. So, the minimal complete deliverable reply in this case would be this @cxs #p1016 6) If you left the "Acknowledge delivery" checkbox checked when you submitted your contact info form (the page this site) you will get a simple Twitter reply on your homepage itself confirming that your messages were sent. If there is anything missing from your message (primarily the issue tag) you will get another Twitter direct message, just like the one for your contact info setup link, with another link where you can view your message queue, on a page that will dynamically coach you on what needs to be added. It's that simple! Once you have a Twitter account, follow our Twitter account (@cxs), and setup the contact info to associate with your To Congress thru Twitter submissions, all you have to do is Step 5 above to send all subsequent messages. Please spend just a moment more and we will explain to you the purpose of the issue tags and how exactly they work. Because the gateway relays messages sent to @cxs automatically to your members of Congress, we needed a way to filter out chatter NOT expressly intended to be so sent. By requiring the use of an issue tag in each message we can have a high degree of confidence that the person sending the message has put some thought into what issue the message is intended to address. There are two types of issue tags. The example above is one of what we are calling "special issue tags" which have PREDEFINED subject lines, just like our regular action pages. For this reason, no personal comment is required. It is just as if your were submitting the subject line as your endorsement of the policy position. The special issue tags all start with #p, and then a number (for example #p1016, #p167, etc.) But we also have general issue tags for larger categories like #health, #economy, etc, so you can speak out on any issue under the sun that concerns you, and rally everyone else you know on Twitter to do the same. If you use one of the standardized general issue tags in your message (all listed in the left hand column) there is no defined subject line besides the general category, so we are requiring that you add a personal comment of at least 40 characters, for otherwise your members of Congress will not know what aspect of health care, the economy, or whatever you are telling them you want them to do something about, and what exactly you want them to do about it. So this would be a possible reply, using a general issue tag, with a comment of the required length @cxs Please pass single payer #health care (HR 676) now Do not combine more than one issue tag in a single reply, or you will get a message from the system asking you to remove one or the other. It is really very simple once you do it the first time. If there is something you need to do that you are not doing exactly correctly, you will get an appropriate message from our processing server as a direct message if you are already a follower, or as a simple Twitter reply message (basically telling you that you need to be a follower of http://twitter.com/cxs to proceed) if you are not. And if you need any help we have also created a category of tags just for that. These "help tags" all start with an asterisk (*) rather that a number sign. So for example, if you need a new login link for the contact info setup page simply send this twitter reply @cxs *login If you need help of some other kind, send a Twitter reply including the help tag *help, and adding also a comment telling us what you need help with, for example something like this @cxs I need *help about how to update my contact info And that message will go not to Congress but to us, and we will respond and walk you through whatever part of the process where you need help. © 2009 tcxs.net, All Rights Reserved