The noise is unreal, so many conversations, questions and pure silliness. The noise is Twitter and the question is how do you listen and participate?
Noise? Well last night I got to thinking, How do Twitter users manage all the noise? Now to be more specific I will use Guy Kawasaki and Robert Scoble as an example.
So at the time of this blog post Guy followed more than 100,000 people on Twitter. Now how does one keep track of whats going on? How do you participate listening to more than 100,000 people ramble on about various things from a new software product to oh I’m washing my car.
Looking at people that follow 10,000 – 100,000 got me thinking, Is this sort of activity possibly brand damaging? If you follow too many and don’t manage followers expectations or participate as I will assume some expect, can you negatively impact your personal or corporate brand?
At some point yesterday Robert Scoble did some house cleaning, he went from following more than 90,000 people to around 1,000. Why would Robert Scoble do this, maybe to effectivly participate? Listening to 90,000 people must be difficult, trying to participate would be near impossible. There would be a point where you upset someone and what sort of negative impact does this have?
There are a lot of questions that could be asked here and really this blog post is turning into a lot of questions. It would be nice to hear from others what they think about this. Is following 10,000+ people just foolish or is there a method to their madness?
Maybe for some people it’s a popularity contest more than a chance to network? Or, maybe, it’s validation of their existence through 140 characters, ‘the more people I follow the greater my existence’?