I am sorry I missed your tweets in November. I have been ignoring Twitter in an effort to do more worthwhile activities.

Perhaps your other followers have been busy and not reading their Twitter stream as well. I am sure if they knew you wanted help, they would have been tweating their hearts out.

I do find it great for one on one conversation, with some bystanders being pulled in at times.

I can understand your dejection when you get lower than 1% response rate to a ‘request’ – where one does not have to buy something. I did vote for Meghna, but frankly I could not connect to her either. May be you wanted to promote her as a young talent or you saw something which I missed.

However, I cannot see your point of making your Twitter account private. If you have more than 2000 followers who are not responding to most of your suggestions or requests, why kill them? May be they are just watching what you are doing? May be they started following you and then followed so many others that they ‘lost’ you?

At some point of time, they may clean up their Twitter following and then, stick with you and listen more carefully to you. Why don’t you wait patiently for them, specially because you don’t have to pay for it.

I would understand if Twitter was utterly useless for you but I think you have made some good friends here. I am ‘for’ limiting my reading list but I am ‘against’ trimming my follower list.

As for me, I start following any good resource I locate and then, if I find good useful tweets, I stay on. Otherwise I ‘unfollow’ them after a few days. This periodic cleaning helps me keep my list of people I follow to a manageable level and I get regularly get alerted to new, useful resources I would not have found otherwise.

You wrote:

“…you are naive to think that every one of your followers has
the same interests, tastes, values or desires that you do.”

I would indeed be naive if I expected that (significant parts bolded
for emphasis).

But just as with my email lists, I do expect that a large part
of my audience will have SIMILAR interests and concerns – if
not identical.

If not, and we significantly diverge in just about everything, why
would you care to follow me on an essentially permission-based
medium as Twitter – and contrarily, why would I continue to follow
you?

No, the problem is with people following too many others.

If – let’s hypothesize here – you and I both followed each other
and ONLY TEN others on Twitter. And the ‘follow’ was based on
mutual respect or admiration, shared interests and concerns.

Then – if I asked you to click a link, subscribe to an RSS feed
(for winning a contest), donate to a cause, spread the word about
a worthy effort, or just vote up a post on Digg or StumbleUpon…

Would You Do It?

I should think you would. I know I would under those circumstances,
if you asked.

Then, when FEWER than 1 in ONE HUNDRED respond, it seems to me a
reasonable conclusion to derive that out of the 2,000+ people who
are following me, either 99 in 100 do NOT share anything much in
common with me (which means there’s no purpose in them following
me on Twitter) OR they simply are not seeing what I’m sharing on
Twitter!

Both are ‘problems’ with the way I’ve been using Twitter until now.

And both will be ’solved’ (I think) by the way I will be changing
how I use Twitter in the future.

Oh, and for the record, I’m not “blaming Twitter” for anything!

Why ever would I – it’s a FANTASTIC platform, for anyone to do
anything they like on a world stage. The only thing I might have
considered blaming Twitter for (if I were PAYING for usage) would
be the frequent outages in the past. Nothing to blame here!

“Relationship building” on Twitter is, imho, one of those terms we
pay ‘lip-service’ to – just like gaining “Friends” on Facebook!

Once your Twitter following crosses a limit, it really isn’t
more than a water-cooler where you wave quick hellos to folks
who are familiar to you – not quite a relationship building
medium akin to a dinner date, or even a shared cup of coffee
at Starbucks!

And that component, again, is one I’ll be addressing in the
Twitter MAGIC post that’ll be shared with my email list – soon!

Over the past few months I upped my following for a variety of reasons – I, too, was experimenting. Now, because of the number I follow, I don’t see all your tweets. And, I don’t have the time to go back and look for them. And, I’m not even interested in some of them.

I did see one of your tweets about this person and took a look. However, I didn’t see anything that fit my interests nor did I feel compelled to follow your requested actions. I’m sure she is a nice young person, but I felt no connection and sorry, but there was nothing there for me.

I am surprised that you would feel that just because people are interested in what you are doing, we should all just be sheep and follow your suggestion to go do something that would benefit you and your friend, but that holds nothing for us. Not that I want anything for “doing a favor”, but seriously, I do have a choice in the matter.

So I guess that’s my point. We are all individuals. We do the things we do for our own personal reasons. Blaming Twitter or anything else for my choice to not follow your desires is a rather shallow generalization and as much as I like you and most of what you are doing, I guess I’m a bit surprised that would be your conclusion.

To me your request was really no different from the so called “gurus” hyping the next book of interviews that some newbie has put together by interviewing that same group of “gurus”. You are welcome to tout whoever you think is worthy, but you are naive to think that every one of your followers has the same interests, tastes, values or desires that you do.

I am grateful when someone thinks enough of me to recommend me or my work to someone else, but I don’t expect all their friends to become my friends, or all their followers to suddenly follow me.

So far I haven’t used Twitter for marketing. I’ve used it to develop relationships and discover new resources. I unfollow people who use it exclusively as a marketing tool because that does not provide any value to me. Using Twitter as an announcement vehicle (as you did with the Tweet-a-thon), in conjunction with other strategies seems to make the most sense if you are using it for marketing.

I see you have a new post about your use of Twitter, so I’ll be interested in seeing how your ideas evolve.

As twitter evolved from a platform for personalities to interact, to the latest & greatest web 2.0 marketing tool, volume increased tremendously, swallowing personal tweets in the flood.

How many posts are conversations vs. pitches? Many tweeters never use the @ to reply.

I imagine there’s a third party app to meet anyone’s vision of what twitter should be for them. If, that is, you want twitter to be more than it is.

Twitter rule #1: Use it any way you want.

There are no other rules. Your expectations of how twitter should work are none of my concern.

For me, twitter works very well as a news reader of some very bright and interesting people. Any relationships that are started are usually nourished off-twitter. Your example of the hospital break room works for me.

I look forward to seeing what twitter becomes for you.