Following

Leo LaPorte copies Conan and creates a Twitter celebrity

March 11, 2010 By Dan Thornton

Inspired by the recent decision of U.S TV star Conan O’Brien to follow just one apparently random Twitter user, Leo LaPorte and his guests on last Sunday’s Twit.tv show (John C Dvorak, Kevin Rose and Clayton Morris) decided to follow suit with an added twist – both the Twitter user that was picked and one random follower will win an Apple iPad.

As a result, @LisaTickledPink was chosen by a search for the phrase ‘I hate technology’, and has shot from 2 followers to 17,428 followers at the time of writing. As a result, she’s turned off email notifications from new followers, but has already been interviewed on radio and TV in her native New Zealand.

Meanwhile the subject of Conan’s attention, @LovelyButton, still has a slight lead with 21,218 followers:

In terms of creating attention, Conan and his 616,177 followers are now up against @leolaporte with 172,323, Dvorak’s 65,656, Morris with 20,899, and of course not only Kevin Rose’s 1,157,702, but also the attention gathered via Digg.

Besides the publicity the two stunts have garnered, it’s interesting to compare the relative pull of a showbiz star vs tech stars, and also that attention and fame on Twitter is still often driven via famous endorsement. Neither of the two subjects are inherently are more or less worthy of following because of the attention they’ve had, but the mix of request/prize/attention has seen both followed by tens of thousands of people.

Notable moments in Twitter history #1: Coke and Pepsi

November 30, 2009 By Dan Thornton

What better way to celebrate the ending of the year, the end of the decade, and the huge rise in popularity and usage of microblogging than starting a series celebrating the biggest moments in Twitter?

So here’s a particularly poignant moment to start with – the hint of a truce between the two rival factions of Coca Cola and Pepsi, from July, 2009.

Coca Cola on Twitter — Coca Cola makes contact on Twitter

The idea came from Amnesia Razorfish, with founder Iain McDonald tweeting both beverage empires. You can read more about how the message picked up momentum with plenty of retweets on the Amnesia Razorfish blog.

Do you review who you’ve endorsed with a follow?

December 31, 2008 By Dan Thornton

Are you a fan of the same people? (Pic: wvs on flickr)

Unlike the people who apparently follow thousands publicly on Twitter, and then have a second account to follow the people they actually listen to, I only have the one main Twitter account.

And until today, I proudly stated that I’d only ever unfollowed two people – but following 1970+ was beginning to stretch even my Twitter Addiction Disorder.

So I thought I’d do a quick check, via Twitter Karma.

In the end, I reduced my Following figure by about 30 or so. Not major, but I don’t think I can realistically go over 2000 for the time being and still interact with a reasonable percentage of people – so it frees up 30 more follows for people.

The criteria for unfollowing was a combination of:

If the account hadn’t been updated in over 100 days.
If it was someone spammy I’d mistakenly let through.
If it was someone whose interests etc were completely unrelated to mine, their blog didn’t help, and I’d never interacted with them in any way.
Or if it was a fake account or a discontinued service.

What surprised me was the amount of followers for accounts that hadn’t been updated in a year, or for discontinued services.

I wonder how many people are following dead accounts, or those that have since been revealed to be fake, or changed purpose.

So do you ever review who you’re following?

Let people know who you are and why you’re following

November 23, 2008 By Dan Thornton

At some point recently, I appeared to have achieved critical mass on Twitter – that is, I get a trickle of people requesting to follow me, even when it isn’t reciprocal, or when I haven’t been particularly active. Sometimes the trickle turns into a miniflood, but I always check out every single follower to decide whether to return the favour – and my ratio of Following to Followers is pretty close to 1:1 (Here’s the proof).

But the decision is getting much harder, because a seemingly increasing number of people are following without giving me a clue of who they are, or why I should return the favour. And following almost 1500 people means I’m becoming more careful about the signal to noise ratio of people I’m following.

Following me, but having updates protected: Unless I know who you are, or you’ve sent me a message, and your updates are protected, how can I guess whether to guess to request to return the favour?
No weblink or informative Bio: A lot of people, myself included, have bio information which doesn’t outline exactly what we do for a job, or where our exact interests lay. For instance, mine is: ‘Social Media, Community Marketing,Blogger,Dad,Writer’, but I’ve seen a lot more vague descriptions. If that’s combined with an absence of a link to a blog, linkedin profile or some clue about who you are, I’m scratching my head again.
Weblink doesn’t give me a clue: This seems to happen with certain content platforms – particularly options like Tumblr, where it’s easy to set up a default Tumblelog without leaving any information. That means I need to spend time going through every post for the last few days to find out more, and makes it tempting to move onto someone/something else in this time-starved world.

This doesn’t mean I only follow people with exactly the same jobs and interests – far from it. But I do only follow people who I think will bring something interesting, entertaining or valuable to the party.

And it’s not just me: Even as I started to write this, I noticed Darren Rowse is running a poll on Twitip, asking ‘Do you automatically follow everyone that follows you?’ Currently 89% of those taking the poll have said they don’t, for similar reasons to myself.

Top tips:

So what’s the best way to let people know who you are?

Insert a relevant personal/company weblink. It can be your blog, your Linkedin profile, your bio on the corporate website etc – just anything that can give some clue about what you do.
If you have a personal/lifestyle type blog you want to link to, then consider either linking to the About page, or to a special landing page or post created to people arriving from Twitter.
Consider using your Twitter background to serve up some information. You can pay professionals, or just experiment with your own image, containing some info on yourself.
And if you’re using Protected Updates, and you want to converse, interact and have a follow reciprocated, then why not contact them via an alternative channel, e.g. an email address on their blog, to let them know who you are and why you’re following them.

It’s an example of what you put into something have a direct relationship with what you get out of it. If you’re informative about who you are, you’re much more likely to get more people finding you, interacting with you, and for those interactions to be far more relevant.

Buy my Twitter background for $50…

September 11, 2008 By Dan Thornton

I’m a big believer in trying out things you want to comment on. Especially if it could contribute to the hosting costs for 140char.com.

Therefore, you can now buy the background of my Twitter profile page for 7 days, for just $50 on Twittads, which I wrote about at length on ‘Is Twittads just a fad?’.

(For the record, I’m followed by 1245, and following 1254 – and just posted by 4071st update at the time of writing).

What I’m interested in is finding out whether anyone is willing to shell out $50 for anyone over the 1000 mark, or where exactly the price point evolves to, and I’m really interested in seeing which advertisers are signed up and using the service and what their method is for seeing a Return on Investment.

Will it convert me to thinking there’s a bright future for Twittad?