Written by Tyson Crosbie
The truth just sounds different. I heard that saying once when in grade school, I don’t know why but it always stuck with me.
The social game on Twitter
Lately on twitter I am starting to get a lot of noise from social gamers. These are the people who think that having the most followers is the key to online fame and or fortune. They probably read Chris Brogan’s blog religiously and implement every strategy that can be automated, duplicated or easily implemented. Unfortunately by doing this they are missing the entire point.
The noise I am talking about specifically in this blog post are the automated responses to new follows. They usually read something like: “Thanks for the follow! I look forward to your tweets! Check out my URL.” Besides being generic and lazy these automatic messages just wreak of the old school advertising numbers game. It rings false to me and I usually choose not to follow or unfollow the owners of this noise.
Demand truth in advertising
I believe we are selling ourselves all the time, and we are buying with our time from those who demand it. Getting what we want when we want is the key to all the things we talk about in Social Media. Relevancy, authenticity, accountability.
In a world that is increasingly on demand and unique to each audience member, it is only relevancy that will rule the day. The days of noise inserted for the masses between the content that we want to consume are waning. Truth in advertising will happen when the advertisements are as valuable to me as the content I am watching, reading or consuming. I hope it will become indistinguishable from the content.
We will likely never get away from the numbers game, it is an important part of being human and social. We want to believe that we are connected to each other and share a common experience. Accountability however, speaks to a personal responsibility in choosing your own content. The more you choose to manage your personal experience the more you will attract a positive one. This way I think the numbers will take care of themselves.
My content filter
Personally, I prefer truth over automation, personal connections over the most connections, accountability over laziness and community over empire. These preferences just feel better than the alternative and I believe that is my truth.
What is your content filter built out of, what is true to you?
This is interesting and a great post. A lot of people nowadays use automation to demand time from others and promote their site, product, or themselves. But I disagree with you that people shouldn’t use it. I think people should use any tool possible to promote whatever they want to promote. What is wrong in giving a thank you for following. I mean really think hard about it.
Regards: rizzy
http://twitter.com/rizzy81
I always welcome all my followers – yes, even bots ;-) – by some words. It is not an automatic answer. I always read the last updates of my mew followers, and if i read their blog if they have one. That give me an picture of my followers at the moment they started to follow me. And if we share at least one interest, i follow them. I never follow automaticly someone. That’s one of my rules
follow who you love / love who you follow
So, i agree with you : “I prefer truth over automation, personal connections over the most connections, accountability over laziness and community over empire”
but as a society, we do need great numbers, impersonnal connections, automation and empires. Just like as individual we do need anonymity and individualism
I’d disagree with your assessment but only from my personal experience. Granted statistically I could be an an outlier. I started in march and I’ve built my entire business out of relationships originally founded through Social Media tools like twitter, linkedin and facebook.
Maybe the uniqueness of working under a personal brand allows me some freedom to also “sell” myself. I think it unfair to fault someone in your community for striving to remain a member of the community, sometimes it is easy to forget that without money it all falls apart.
Left off you post was the undeniable fact that advertising on social media doesn’t work very well. Having spent eight years working on the media placement side for a popular search engine, I know the numbers. No question that the inventory is bountiful, but the key metric, that of click-through-rate, is almost non-existent. Twitter specifically, hasn’t any real application beyond dissemination of information which members think is important, and which they hope their audience does as well – some level of self promotion allowed. Truth be told, social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN and others, are most effective as a means of self promotion rather than true commerce. Case in point: my wife recently told me of her disenchantment with a good friend, whose sole contact with her network via Facebook, is in the effort of selling her home-spun jewelery.
I personally don’t consider it as horrible as the spammers (which thankfully on twitter are fairly easy to ignore), just unauthentic.
Authenticity is pretty high on my value scale so unfortunately when confronted with the automatic responses I feel free to ignore their other messages as well.
Agree with you; what you describe comes awfully close to spamming, and I hate it. The most offended however, are the offenders, as they miss out entirely on the beauty of Twitter.
I honestly believe that twitter is a tool and as such should be used to the greatest advantage of those who use it. Unfortunately (or in my opinion fortunately) each user must develop a unique set of filters and strategies. Mine will likely not work for everyone.
Also, I find that my own filters and strategies keep evolving as well and find the process confusing, exciting and wonderfully just like life. :)
When I have the time I check out my new followers. I’ll read their latest tweets. Ask myself if I want to see more of this every day. Check their website or blog to see more in depth, who they are. I follow according to my intuition and the value received from reading/checking the follower out. Follow or not I’ll thank them for following because it’s an affirmation and an honor. I have a watch list of people I’m ready to unfollow because I actually read twitter and time is limited. If you want followers, it’s good to check your word cloud or page of latest posts to see how it would look to potential followers. Quality control. Right now I’m heavy on RT. @benstock
I’ve had a rebirth of my feelings about following as of late, mostly due to the tools that have evolved to help with this. ie: TweetDeck. It allows me the flexibility to follow the conversation in a commercial sense through: ego searching, customer service and giving my fans/customers the ability a direct line of communication if they need it. At the same time I am able to filter the noise and concentrate on relationships with my close family and friends.
My real concern is the automated responders. If you are going to talk to me make it real, not a recording.
Really good post!
I’m not a fan of follower-hoarders on Twitter (Is anyone?), so this totally hits the spot.
Personally, I use Twitter to post a mix of random thoughts, events that I’m involved in or that I think people might dig, and to follow people I think are interesting either because I know them personally, because they are in one of the circles that I run in, or if they’re just interesting enough to follow with little personal connection. For better or worse, there’s no real strategy behind what I post because A) (also for better or worse) it’s a reflection of me and B) I figure people will either dig what I post or not, and they’ll follow or unfollow at their own whim.
I have to be honest and say that I’ve never been in the practice of thanking people that follow me. Maybe I’m just an inconsiderate clod.
I try to write thank you cards for gifts and thoughtful gestures when I can throughout daily life, so I don’t think I’m too inconsiderate of a clod.
I think it might be the nature of how easy it is to interact on Twitter that leads me to feel that you can just as easily jump into a conversation with a new person right off the bat as thank them. You’re essentially thanking them for the opportunity to do so, so I figure you might as well thank them by being active and jumping into their world head first without delay or prologue.
Ben I’ve often responded to the automated DM’s as well to similar results. Very disappointing.
Must rush … short snapper for now:
I’ve often (real often!) hinted at some of my commenters that what they’ve written was, well … not worth much. “Really great!” and “Thanks for this!” … so easy to feel warm and fuzzy, and I don’t want to slip into cynicism, but really.
And I’ve been noticing the same in email from *cough* some folk … from reading the reply you couldn’t tell what they were responding to, it’s amorphous vague fluff.
Point is: the other day I got a series of comments that were obviously from a spam-bot and huh huh they were written in precisly that style! “Thanks so much for this post, I enjoyed reading it very much and look forward to reading the rest of your blog” yaaaa right huh huh.
I don’t think we can filter out the fake.
What we can do: be more responsive as authentic individuals and principled practitioners.
If I don’t do it now, then who will, when?!
cheers
–bentrem
As a rule I’d agree, use twitter as you like but suffer the consequences gracefully.
I’m sensitive to authenticity and I’ll listen to you much more carefully if I feel the message is for me. But I am just one person. :)