bob gets bloggy

When I started using Twitter…

I was clueless.  I thought I wanted to generate a large number of followers so that I could be heard.  I researched how to do so and ended up following the recommendations of Guy Kawasaki.  What I learned:

<> Kawasaki’s method is an excellent way to follow and be followed by people who think that “social networking” is a way to generate customers by offering to teach others how to use social networking to generate customers [kind of the postmodern answer to Amway].

<> It is no fun trying to find content of actual interest from actual friends amid a timeline that includes hundreds of tweets that would count as spam if they had landed in my email inbox.

<> The tools that let me have my cake and eat it too (“following” people without actually ever having to see their tweets) became a way to turn something that ought to be fun (socializing) into drudgery (tagging new followers into different groups, keeping up with following those who followed me, following those who have lots of followers and automatically follow back, and on and on…).

<> The whole premise of using tools to follow more people than I intended to read is deception, not only of those I followed (who were supposed to think someone was out there actually reading the output I was working so hard to avoid), but self-deception as well, since I was building this list of hundreds of followers who, by the very nature of our relationship, were among those most likely to be screening me out in the same way.

After deciding I had made a major mistake in the way I started with Twitter, I began to pare away at the list of people I followed.  Every time I checked a timeline, the spammy tweets near the top earned an unfollow.  But this was taking forever and became Yet Another Chore.

Today I took drastic action: I unfollowed everyone and started over with real people I actually want to hear from.

I feel better.  Checking in with Twitter is fun again.

Maybe someone can learn from my mistakes.