140Char

For every criticism of the presumed mindless nature of Twitter conversation, it’s just as easy to find it being used in an interesting and useful way.

For instance, published author Jeff Kirvin wasn’t sure of the way to kill a character in his current work, so he put the question out on Twitter. (HT Steve Rubel). And out of the suggestions he received he found some that might work, and enough to get him thinking more (Read more interesting details on brainstorming with the hive mind).

Not only is this an example of Twitter aiding creativity, which is a counterpoint to the idea that microblogging kills writing and full-length blogging, but it also shows an example of someone who isn’t hiding his work away until it’s complete – because, after all, the people tweeting suggestions aren’t likely to suddenlly find the drive to crank out 50,000+ words. So why worry about sharing some details and asking for some suggestions?

At some point recently, I appeared to have achieved critical mass on Twitter – that is, I get a trickle of people requesting to follow me, even when it isn’t reciprocal, or when I haven’t been particularly active. Sometimes the trickle turns into a miniflood, but I always check out every single follower to decide whether to return the favour – and my ratio of Following to Followers is pretty close to 1:1 (Here’s the proof).

But the decision is getting much harder, because a seemingly increasing number of people are following without giving me a clue of who they are, or why I should return the favour. And following almost 1500 people means I’m becoming more careful about the signal to noise ratio of people I’m following.

• Following me, but having updates protected: Unless I know who you are, or you’ve sent me a message, and your updates are protected, how can I guess whether to guess to request to return the favour?
• No weblink or informative Bio: A lot of people, myself included, have bio information which doesn’t outline exactly what we do for a job, or where our exact interests lay. For instance, mine is: ‘Social Media, Community Marketing,Blogger,Dad,Writer’, but I’ve seen a lot more vague descriptions. If that’s combined with an absence of a link to a blog, linkedin profile or some clue about who you are, I’m scratching my head again.
• Weblink doesn’t give me a clue: This seems to happen with certain content platforms – particularly options like Tumblr, where it’s easy to set up a default Tumblelog without leaving any information. That means I need to spend time going through every post for the last few days to find out more, and makes it tempting to move onto someone/something else in this time-starved world.

This doesn’t mean I only follow people with exactly the same jobs and interests – far from it. But I do only follow people who I think will bring something interesting, entertaining or valuable to the party.

And it’s not just me: Even as I started to write this, I noticed Darren Rowse is running a poll on Twitip, asking ‘Do you automatically follow everyone that follows you?’ Currently 89% of those taking the poll have said they don’t, for similar reasons to myself.

Top tips:

So what’s the best way to let people know who you are?

• Insert a relevant personal/company weblink. It can be your blog, your Linkedin profile, your bio on the corporate website etc – just anything that can give some clue about what you do.
• If you have a personal/lifestyle type blog you want to link to, then consider either linking to the About page, or to a special landing page or post created to people arriving from Twitter.
• Consider using your Twitter background to serve up some information. You can pay professionals, or just experiment with your own image, containing some info on yourself.
• And if you’re using Protected Updates, and you want to converse, interact and have a follow reciprocated, then why not contact them via an alternative channel, e.g. an email address on their blog, to let them know who you are and why you’re following them.

It’s an example of what you put into something have a direct relationship with what you get out of it. If you’re informative about who you are, you’re much more likely to get more people finding you, interacting with you, and for those interactions to be far more relevant.

Just a quick update that I won’t be online much, if at all, for the next week, so updates might be quiet until my return…

Security North by James Cridland on Flickr (CC Licence)

Funnily enough, searching for a suitable image on Flickr just gave me the above picture by James Cridland, whose blog and Twitter accounts I started reading recently – and the discovery of each was almost entirely unrelated!

Anyway, a good friend and colleague is aiming to supply some guest posts for here and www.thewayoftheweb.net while I’m offline, so you shouldn’t be alone. And as he’s a video expert, hopefully he’ll redress a slight lack of Seesmic, 12seconds, and Mobatalk coverage due to my lack of good looks a webcam.

And after the soul searching I mentioned in my last post, there are several really good things which have renewed my commitment to the site in the jaws of posting something once a week to just keep it going. So this week is a great time to contribute ideas, suggestions, topics, applications, tools or anything else which might be of interest, as I should be online long enough to access my email and even print off some ideas to work onn for my return…just drop your input to thewayoftheweb at googlemail dot com