February 21, 2008Twitter's potential in 341 comments or less
Filed Under: Join the Conversation
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Jeremiah Owyang has lit or should I say twit a firestorm of conversation and engagement with this post and this tweet to illustrate both the explosive potential and power of Twitter (presence applications) as a powerful conversational and communal "tool"
341 comments (and counting) says a LOT. When is the last blog post you saw garner this kind of response? It's a great UNM2PNM organic case study...
Like Jeremiah, but unlike Phil, I share the same POV about a reciprocal approach to expanding my network.
You can find me on Twitter here - add me and I will add you back.
Update 1: This defeats the purpose (as I'm blogging this), but I tried out an experiment on Twitter itself which was to see how quickly I could hit the 1,000 person follower mark. Based on a tweet on 2/18 at 3.43pm, I decided (thanks to @BarbaraKB) to give away 1 hour of consulting/conversation time to my 1,000th follower. That was when I had 900 followers. I currently have 935
Update 2: So...I got "Owyanged". Jeremiah tweeted about this and the floodgates opened up. I now have 1,034 followers and I belive that @DHotchkiss is my 1,000th follower and therefore, gets an hour of my time.
HANDS DOWN, twitter beat blogging as a means to activate immediate response/impact.
Now I have to think about how to one-up this. What about a presentation by myself and Jeremiah to the person or company that ends up being my 2,500th follower? Jeremiah - you interested? We could ustream it to our combined followers...
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Comments
I also follow everyone who follows me back. I have to admit though, lately, keeping up with the new twitter follower emails has been a bit overwhelming. I have several tactics that help me manage the follow-to-follower ratio.
No matter how hard I try though, I am always behind. I hear that there is an app out there that automatically follows back those that follow you... but that kinda feels like cheating to me.
Posted by: Julia Roy
The hard part is catching up to all those who follow you, but you didn't follow back. That's a manual and labor intensive process.
My new process is much simpler:
- all twitter mails go into a folder
- when the folder is bolded i.e. unread mails, I go in, click on the link which opens the browser and immediately click on follow
Done :)
Posted by: Joseph Jaffe
I do the same thing as well.
I use a smart folder I label twitter... still, I miss peeps somehow. It's probably because I have anywhere between 10-40 browser tabs open at any given time and new followers get lost in my tab shuffle. Lately, I've been clicking follow, but it doesn't register and I have to select it several times and refresh the tab to complete the transaction. My chronic case of a.d.d. doesn't help either. haha.
Posted by: Julia Roy
There's a tool called Twitter Karma (http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/) that can show you who you're following, who's following you, etc. Then you can bulk follow/unfollow as needed.
Posted by: Adrienne Doss
I'm amazed with this "explosive potential" you speak of. Consider this: I'm aware of your experiment because I added myself to the list of "Internet Marketing Gurus on Twitter" hosted by Andy Beal http://tinyurl.com/2c6tyy
He must be amazed with this potential also.
We are not yet following each other, but I see you belong to Andy's list. Someone else from the list mentioned your experiment and now I'm learning about your work. Exponential networking is a beautiful thing.
I'm wondering if your announcement causes the frequency of new followers to decrease as you get close to the magic number.
Do you think people might lurk like they might when placing a just-in-time bid on ebay? That's my strategy. ;)
Posted by: John Howard
Update: In the time it took for me to post to this blog, you gained 45 or so followers, crossing the 1000 mark. So much for my strategy. When I think about it, lurking around your topic means you are holding someone's attention- a win-win scenario.
Posted by: John Howard
Well, I follow those where I see interested content, esp. I don't follow spammers who only repeat their message all over again anyway. Of course having 1000 people you follow these messages will be drowned in the mass. Same for languages I don't understand.
And actually I nevertheless follow nearly everybody who follows me.
The only problem is that I seem to miss great things as it's getting more and more. Esp. if I want to be connected to a special crowd at a special time (e.g. those being at an event so I don't miss where they are meeting etc.).
So I am wondering if other people with a certain amount of friends just don't care about stuff they might miss or if it's a problem for them.
Apparently what's needed is a better filter mechanism (not only for tweets) maybe based on APML or other standards but as long as it's not there I guess people will usually keep it low on following.
Another thing I wanted to mention (esp. regarding Phil). I might not have met most of these people yet in person and I might not know yet who they are but I would like to find out! And what might begin with a twitter friend might eventually become a real one. Real in terms of met in RL. I think a friendship can also be real if you haven't met in RL.
Posted by: Christian Scholz
Brass tacks: I use Twitter differently than you do. And, as Eric Eggertson points out on my blog, my approach demonstrates more about the limitations of Twitter than 1) the people that are stacked up in the follower-request queue, or 2) the presumed reciprocity of my approach.
With Twitter, I'm far less concerned about attention than I am interacting with known quantities.
To claim that my approach is not reciprocal rises to the level of "gross misrepresentation", to put it charitably.
Since these things appear to mean so much to you -- you *have* brought it up twice now -- know that currently follow 325 and have 294 following me.
One thing's for sure, though... I *won't* be calling the balance of those people "SOB's [that] are not following me back."
Posted by: Phil Gomes
Phil,
Are you seriously only responding to this now? The long tail wags.
Chill out my friend...I wasn't calling you a SOB at all and yes, I mentioned your blog post (which someone had alerted me to) twice...but that was in quick succession and in context of discussing this with you on Jaffe Juice.
You of all people should know that there's no point in reading too much into one line which may or may not be taken out of context.
Bottom line: we have different POV's on this and I still want to chat to you about this in a productive conversation. That's ok. Disagreeing or agreeing to disagree is ok.
And if your feelings were hurt by the implied SOB title...I apologize :)
Posted by: Joseph Jaffe
