Alister Cameron // Blogologist

Today Twitter is all abuzz about Tweepme.com.

There are a lot of people signing up for the service and they’re each sending out an automated tweet announcing the fact. And there are a lot of fellow Twitter users up in arms about the “wrongness” of the Tweepme.com service.

I am very please the Tweepme.com service has come along, because — aside from anything it may or may not achieve for those who have signed up in the hope of gaining lots of followers for no effort — it has caused the Twitter community to throw around (again) the question of what Twitter is actually for. And clearly there is no consensus on that question!

Here’s my opinion, as someone who spends most of the day with Twitter in view — more or less.

Twitter is NOT primarily a conversational medium. I should hope that is not a controversial point, but if you think it is, ask yourself — if Twitter really was first and foremost a conversational medium, why are “conversations” not threaded? Indeed, Twitter makes no effort to make group conversations easy to participate in or visualise. Even a conversation between two individuals on Twitter is only obvious to another person if they use a third-party tool like Tweetdeck (with some customizations).

Further, the more successful you are on Twitter (i.e. the more followers you have and the more effectively you’re messaging out to them) the harder it is to maintain any kind of conversational “flow” with individual followers. The Twitter elite have more DMs and replies than they can possibly respond to. Enough said.

So let’s agree that Twitter is not engineered as a conversational tool. That’s a by-product, as it were.

I believe Twitter is at its core a messaging platform… simpler still, a messaging protocol — a tool to allow one person to blast messages out to a group of “followers”, while at the same time electing to “follow” the flow of messages from certain other people. It’s a brutally simple messaging platform, indeed protocol. In its simplicity is its genius. That very simplicity is what doesn’t force people to use Twitter as a conversational tool. They can most easily use it just to blast messages out to others. Conversations are a little harder to do (well).

It follows then, that Twitter is not a social network (a category of web app that IS designed for conversation and shared activity). So why are people complaining about “spamming”, about cultural no-nos that implicitly assume that all kinds of caveats should be imposed on the nature, number and flavour of messages people send out?!

For example, I have no problem with someone using Twitter to exclusively send out commercial messages. No problem at all. I would however reasonably assume that that person will struggle to get anyone to follow them. And that’s their challenge, but I will not complain that they do not have a right to blast out messages of a commercial nature. They’ll just be lonely doing it, that’s all!

The sooking of many about Tweepme.com seems to center on the complaint that it’s not right to “artificially” inflate your Twitter follower numbers in some “non-organic” manner. Rubbish. Twitter does it! How else do you describe Twitter’s own new member recommendations page?! iJustine, for example – as wonderful a person as she may be — probably doesn’t deserve the 5,000 new followers per day she receives from people who I can guarantee have almost universally never really looked at her Twitter timeline.

I would put to you that the volume of non-organic followers she has amassed amounts to the “gap” between her existing follower growth curve and what that curve would have looked like without her inclusion on Twitter’s recommendation list. And it’s a bloody big gap!

If Twitter should have chosen such a non-organic way to massively boost the follower numbers of a(n arbitrary) select group of so-called “elite” Twitterers — “non-organic” in the sense that new Twitter users are for the most part blindly selecting these people to follow — then it calls into questions the very significance of this organic vs non-organic dichotomy… at least in Twitter’s “official” mind.

I have (had) much to say about how a person should conduct themselves on Twitter… about the tone of voice, the “best practice” approach to building relationships, about strategically complementing other online activities like blogging, etc. But I have nothing much to say about building a following. I say, go for it. Do whatever you can to get as many people following you as you can!

To use a blogging parallel, I advise my clients and students to use “social media” means — like Digg-bait blog posts — to accelerate their SEO activities and gain more links, faster. A client of mine may be selling to the scrapbooking market, say, but for the most part it doesn’t matter where they get (organic) links from… they just need to get a lot of them before they’re going to rank in Google. While I eschew FFA directories and other “dodgy” approaches to getting links, I assure my clients that the sorts of people who will give them those new links — off the back, say, of a promoted Digg story — are not likely to be in their target market, but it doesn’t matter because they’re good for a link, and that’s reason enough.

On Twitter, this same strategic approach means going after followers wherever you can get them. If you “suck” they’ll unfollow you soon enough, but if you don’t suck, you’re getting yourself to the position of a “Twitterer-of-note”, and that’s a good thing. I may sell scrapbooking supplies to women in Australia, but if I have a 50,000 strong Twitter following, I have influence and “reach” and it will only serve to strengthen my more specific and focussed sales and marketing activities to my target market.

Is anyone going to argue with that?!

Yes… I am (almost) suggesting that gaining followers as fast as we all can is quite acceptable. Be very careful arguing me on this point… because a follower is only an “unfair” or “unreasonable” follower if they didn’t want to follow… and on Twitter there is not, nor needn’t there be, any such thing. Unfollowing is easy.

Please let’s not complicate all this any more than absolutely necessary. And leave Tweepme.com alone.

 

The Christmas/New Year break was, in hindsight, not the best time to organize this competition… but never mind! The prizes are still awesome, and the quality of submissions has been really excellent. So we’re into Phase Two (no more submissions will now be accepted) and Guy Kawasaki will receive the list of ten finalists shortly.

In about a week we will announce both the ten finalists as well as the winner. All ten finalists will receive a FREE license of the incredible Market Samurai. Now, if you’ve never heard about this great piece of software you’ve got some catching up to do. It’s hands down the best keyword reseach tool out there and the handiwork of Eugene Ware, Brent Hodgson and team.

If you don’t know much about SEO or keyword research in particular, why not grab a coffee and check out this pretty in-depth chat I recently had with Eugene and Brent, in front of the latest release of Market Samurai… you’ll be blown away by what this program can do.

It normally retails for about USD$150 but our top ten finalists will each receive a fully licensed copy for FREE! A big thank you to the guys at Noble Samurai for their generous gifts.

For the winner — chosen by Guy Kawasaki against criteria of originality, creativity and wow factor — my company, Australis Media, is giving away one year’s free business-grade hosting on the same power-packed server infrastructure that hosts my own blog. This hosting package includes unlimited emails, subdomains and MySQL databases and all the bells and whistles you’d expect. It’s valued at about USD$250.

Finally, here just 30 of the impressive submissions we received…

Between now and when the finalists and winner are announced, I’d love you to drop a comment below and tell us which one of the above is your favourite, and why. Of course, If you find another Twitter page which you think is a stellar performer, you can link to that one too

(Note: I am aware that the Problogger Twitter page and a number of others were created by a professional design company that specializes in this kind of thing, but since I didn’t specifically ban “commercially created” entries, I feel they need to be included on merit as much as any other entrant. Sorry if you disagree.)