I wrote this in November, 2008. Nearly seven years later, it’s time for an update.
I am on Twitter, and you’re more than free to follow me there.
However, I will not always follow back. Don’t take it personally, but I don’t sit back waiting to gather every notification so I can immediately respond with a return follow.
I do respond to just about every reply sent my way. If you engage me in enough conversation, I will follow you because I’ll know more about you and find you interesting.
My Tweets themselves will be erratic. I might not be on Twitter for three or four days at a stretch. Then I might tweet 200 times in one day (and usually at that volume, nearly all of them will be engaged in conversations with people.)
You’re welcome to follow my conversations, and just maybe you’ll find other interesting people. You’re welcome to ignore my conversations with others, and that’s fine too. The people I follow are the people I’ve had interesting discussions with.
- I follow people who are local to me.
- I follow people who are in the same region.
- I follow other communicators and marketers.
- I follow people who are interesting.
- I follow people with similar political views, who are interesting.
- I follow people with opposite political views, who are interesting.
- I follow people who can occasionally be abusive and abrasive.
You’ll notice that I have more people following me than I follow. Don’t get hung up on the number. I’ve been on the service for a long time, and I am followed by many scripts and bots that have never provided value. I’m on a couple of lists that serve me up for the first slice of Twitterspam when a new segment of society tries to abuse the community. Lucky me. That doesn’t make me unfriendly, or stuck up or anything of the sort.
I don’t believe in Twitter Etiquette. If someone showed you a list of how people had to behave, then I probably don’t believe all of it (and don’t think you should either.) There’s no such thing as “too many tweets,” or “multiple tweets,” or “following too many people,” or “follower/following ratios,” or “welcoming new followers.” There are no rules, there are no guidelines. Just be yourself, be a human, and be humane.
I don’t use Qwitter, or Twitterkarma, or any other service that plays games with followers. Quit me, I don’t care. Twitter isn’t about stats, it’s about people and conversations and links and ideas. If you’d like to keep up with me in a way that isn’t so “in your face,” then subscribe to my Twitter conversations in your feed reader. (Twitter doesn’t allow RSS feeds anymore, so this is the only part I have removed in the 2015 edit.)
I do look forward to the conversations to come.
In the mean time, why not learn a little more about this site, why it’s got such a strange name, or even go to the most recent essays?
