Posted by Duke Sherman on April 14 at 10:30 AM
I live tweeted an energy event last night #dgn and woke up to find 8 people had quit following me. I find that out via the service called
Qwitter which sends me an email when someone Qwits me. Now that is not that big of a deal. I have a pretty amazing community of people that care about the breadth of issues I do and the ones that don't stick with me are usually totally lame or great big marketers who collect people for no apparent reason. In spite of knowing that I still had this feeling of loss.
A little loss, but I felt like as though I was a failing in some way. It was a failure to some degree I suppose. I was "off message" I did not normally blog about energy and sustainability so 15 tweets in a row about that was a bit much for the less attached.
So what is the loss? Is it opportunity loss in the form of potential contacts? Not so much. I think it has everything to do with the simple social contract we have with people who we link with. I give information type "A" and my Twitter friends want information type "A". When I stop giving type "A" and gave different information in large amounts it was a bit of a betrayal. The insulting part for me is when the other person doesn't stick with you. They have trusted you for months tp provide good tweets but a small annoyance to them shows that you are at the edge of their list. You have been made unimportant (I know who cares right? They weren't my friends anway! <pout>). I only lost one random associate that I was interested in but we had no bond other than being partly made from the internet. The real canary in the coal mine is when your close friends defriend you which fortuantely has yet to happen.
For my part there have been very few people that I have stopped following. I attribute this to my strong consideration of those that I follow. I do not automatically follow anyone. When someone follows me I get alerts from
Twimailer that are essentially digests about the person in my inbox about those who follow me. I can go to the link in their bio from my inbox and see their last 10 tweets.
I also weigh the number of people they follow. If it is over 300 I get wary. If it is 1000+ I almost never follow them. I am seeking a meaningful relationship with the people I am in contact with. If I don't follow the person back I hope at some point they will reply to me about something and I will have the chance to see that they have recently focused their feed on.
There is also a general rule I have. My posts must create value through links or insights about pertinent information 8 out of 10 tweets.
Finally, the people I follow that don't follow me back are usually vbig deal types in fields I am interested in that unless I am "bonified" or a personal contact it would be very hard for them to follow so many people back.
So what do Qwitters mean for my social capital? Not sure yet. Is it my credibility through the number of followers that matters? Is it the value of my follwers? When do contextualized links and transmissions gets valued based on their reach rather than just clicks? Perhaps a future
Whuffie score will tell me. Till then I am just as happy sharing links and tweets with the friends I do have.
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5 Comments so far...
I'm always mildly irritated when I lose followers after an event or protracted series of tweets that may seem to my Twitter followers to be out of character coming from me.
I think that the best Twitter streams are those that, for the most part, speak to a niche, but that also incorporate other areas of the author's interests and / or lives. I don't think that the human condition of having multifaceted interests should be inhibited by worrying that one's followers will unfollow you if you tweet about, e.g., a conference that is outside of their interest in you, or a particularly amazing restaurant you ate at last evening.
Twitter streams should be as varied and as interesting as those who author them, and I think those who don't like that and unfollow because of it are being very shortsighted.
Posted by Atherton Bartelby on April 14 at 3:18 PMGood thought. I agree with you. It is a funny thing because friends normally become very close or fade in waves but with Twitter its on or off. It is a very distinct choice. It is also different from Facebook and MySpace for me because I think of Twitter as more like a continuous dialogue where Facebook is more of a newspaper. Perhaps it is just my method of use but being left on FB is much less pronounced because friends fade away but on Twitter, at least with Qwitter, you are told. Perhaps I should just quit Qwitter in the ultimate gesture of q(w)uitting!?
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