About half of our team is on the road this week, covering the California Spring Trials. Two teams of editors and videographers are headed south down Pacific Coast Highway in California, reporting on the latest and greatest plant introductions from major breeders and suppliers.

For the next seven days, they’ll have the newest plant varieties for landscapes, garden centers and home gardens, and breaking news from the world of plants.

You’ll find daily coverage at our main site, and can sign up for our daily enewsletter here. You can also get up-to-the-minute dispatches on Twitter by following Greenhouse Management magazine at @greenhousemag, GM Editor Kristy O’Hara at @GMmagEditor, our new consumer-focused app A Garden Life at @agardenlife and the hashtag #springtrials.

Snow Circles from Beauregard, Steamboat Aerials on Vimeo.

Here’s our weekly collection of cool stuff we found online. Enjoy!

• U.S. cities lose 4 million trees a year
• Write better Twitter headlines.
• Toilet-to-tap turn you off? It’s good enough for astronauts
• New rules for H-2B.
• These Mark Awards are pretty bad-ass.
• Where is the River Volga? What Tomas Edison asked potential hires in his interview process.
• Above: The making of snow circle art by Sonja Hinrichsen at Rabbit Ear Pass, Steamboat Springs, Colo. (via The Dirt)

One of my favorite days each month. Thanks @lawnlandscapetwitter.com/ChadsLandscape…

— Chad’s Landscape (@ChadsLandscape) February 17, 2012

Love to see stuff like this. Thanks, Chad!

You can read our February issue on screen here.

And if you don’t already have it, download our app for iOS and Android.

Merlin is killing it, as always.

Any bias against NPR notwithstanding, he’s absolutely right. The beauty of sites like Twitter, Facebook and a blog are that they allow you to speak directly to your audience without formality or unnecessary structure. You can speak to your customers online the same way you speak to them in person.

A recent study from the Pew Research Center showed 93% of links in mainstream media tweets link back to those organizations’ own sites. We at L&L are sometimes guilty of this, too.

But the lesson is that you should use your social media platforms not to (just) push your content out into the ether. You should use them to give your followers, friends and customers something useful, interesting or kind of funny.

To post, not to post, where to post – with the different social media avenues, all of which offer unique networking and content sharing abilities – those can be difficult questions. We found this handy graphic that may help answer some of your questions.

Clearly this may be more meaningful for personal use than business. It would probably look bad if we were always checking in at bars. And we don’t necessarily agree with the LinkedIn as being “boring” – we get great insight and traction in our Lawn & Landscape group. You should join us.

You don’t sell computers, or gadgets. But, we could all take a page from the folks at Apple on how they approach customer service.

If you like Apple products, and you’re their target demographic, then you’re in the club. They work very hard to give sell you (at a premium) what you want.

If you don’t — you don’t like the iPad, you think the iPhone should have more rounded corners, etc. — then they don’t have time for you. Send him your complaints and suggestions, and Steve Jobs will not be nice to you. He won’t be kind because he’s busy trying to please the people who already think Apple is awesome, and doesn’t want to waste time trying to convert someone who isn’t already sold.

It’s the same in any service industry. Why spend lots of time, attention and focus trying to capture new customers who don’t already want a new landscape or a greener yard? Spending that time on people who are already sold — or better, are already your customers — will be much more profitable.

Oh, and if you don’t already, you should definitely follow @lawnlandscape on Twitter.

Tweet image credit: @hotdogsladies.