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. :)

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.

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.

Also, I find that my own filters and strategies keep evolving as well and find the process confusing, exciting and wonderfully just like life. :)

My real concern is the automated responders. If you are going to talk to me make it real, not a recording.

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

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.