Order C.B.S. Today:
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Social Media Narcissism Etc.
While Avvo was having a conference in Seattle last week (at which they and I were invited to speak, billed as “Three Angry Lawyers,” but only if we paid our own way), Scott Greenfield and Brian Tannebaum twitted using the #avvo hashtag. For example:
This #avvo used car salesman conference is deeply disturbing.
and
Remember something you avvocating maniacs, if you’re not a good lawyer, people will find out, despite your blogs and online garbage #avvo
Avvo was displaying the #avvo twitter timeline on the podium.
One of the attendees, Sonny Cohen, wrote a blog post, When Flames Erupt in the Twitter-enabled Conference Backchannel (no, seriously, that’s the title). Conceding that Scott and Brian “had some great points about abuse of social media, thoughtless blogging and even the alleged ‘social media gurus’ (SMG) who industrialize the process of building real human networks,” he nonetheless called them “harassers,” “flamers,” and “jackass” (half a jackass each, apparently).
Cohen’s post, and his Twitter response to Scott, were overwrought and self-important to the point of narcissism. It’s Twitter; if someone says something you don’t want to hear, you can block it. Brian and Scott didn’t even know that Avvo was displaying the timeline on the podium. (Had they known, they would have had a lot more fun with it.)
Saving for another day modern Homo Internetus’s tendency to throw around heavy words like “harassment” in response to the slightest criticism: are narcissism and hysteria prerequisites for a job as an internet marketer?
I posted a comment to the blog post, to the effect of “‘Harassers’? Really, Sonny? Credibility fail.” Or rather, I tried to post a comment, but Cohen did not publish it.
Add intellectual cowardice to the list of character traits that Cohen is displaying in this episode.
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Twitter Strategy
A colleague followed me on twitter four times in a month. To do that, he would have had to unfollow me three times in a month. I asked him what was up with that. His reply:
I’ve found I don’t like to “follow” without being “followed” back. Seems a one way conversation – not fun for me.I found that some people would follow back after the second time I followed them. Assumed the email we get was the reminder, soon buried under more recent ones. The theory has worked, with people I know who are less tech savvy.
This strategy, of unfollowing people who don’t follow you back works great—for twitterers like FollerBackGirl (following 4,050; followed by 3,688). I created FollerBackGirl to demonstrate the irrelevance of Twitter followers by quickly finding a large number of people who will follow anything that follows them back.
Following only people who follow you back is a good way to keep up with everything FollerBackGirl and her followers are doing, and to accumulate more worthless followers.
Unfollowing those who don’t follow you back is a flawed strategy for any other purpose.
I don’t read 90% of what the people I follow write. I couldn’t possibly—I’m following more than 200 people. And I don’t respond to 90% of what I do read—I couldn’t do that without hiring a GhostTwitterer. So 90% of the time Twitter is something less than a one-way conversation, and 1% of the time it’s something more. I respond to less than one tweet in a hundred from the timeline of people I follow. If I followed everyone who followed me, I wouldn’t read 5% of what the people I followed wrote or respond to one tweet in 200+.
I also don’t give what someone charmingly called the reacharound followback. I don’t follow my followers back just because they follow me.
More interesting is better than more followers. The Twitter Interesting Index v1 is the number of followers a person has, divided by the number of people he follows (v2 will be recursive, so that being followed by more-interesting people increases your Interesting Index more). A person gets more followers than he follows by being interesting. @ScottGreenfield, for example, has a TII-1 of 36.5. @WestWingReport has a TII-1 of 29.8. @ChrisPirillo has a TII-1 of 115.9. All of these people are worth following, unless your rule for whether to follow someone includes “does he follow me back?”
Here’s my strategy: If I see a retweet of something that makes me say, “I’m glad I didn’t miss that!” I’ll look up the twitterer and, if he’s often interesting, follow him.
If I see that someone has followed me, I’ll look at his TII-1. If it’s less than 1 and she is not a total noob, I won’t even bother reading her tweets. Otherwise I’ll look at her last 20 or so twits, and if I see something that makes me say “I’m glad I didn’t miss that” I’ll follow her.
I follow interesting people. Whether they follow me back is unimportant. In educating and entertaining me, they’re giving me a gift. Expecting them to follow me back as well would be not only counterproductive, but also churlish.
