Let me break down twitter for you. It’s been abused by Oprah and Ashton Kutcher, it’s been used in by stars to flaunt their nudity (NSFW? I guess…). It’s all the rage and no one knows why.

I use twitter quite prolifically – mostly to vent, sometimes to ask questions. I don’t use auto-follow, I don’t use any “tips or tricks” to gather “hundreds of followers in a day.” I simply use the service, blog, and tweet. Somehow, I keep getting followers – possibly because of my associations of people I talk to (tweet with) or my hash tag usage (possibly again, through people’s auto-follow based on the hash tag usage from people). I’ve played with the twitter API on an as-yet-unreleased twitter project (I’m trying to make sure I “follow the rules” and get OAUTH working). Has that got me followers? Possibly.

Twitter – It’s Your NICHE, Not Your Numbers.

The very simple key to twitter – it’s not popularity, it’s not mass following, it’s not having the most followers.

The inherent problem with twitter, is, as since the myspace days everyone felt that the more people you had “friended” the cooler you had to be. I guess this herald’s to people’s high-school days where higher numbers of friends translated into something that mattered – perhaps the inherent psychological need is filled (yes, wikipedia link, deal with it).

The problem is that people still associate greater numbers with some sort of correlation to their skill level, reputation, or validation of “social media mastering.”

Again – It’s Your NICHE

If you have 50,000 people following you, and you’re following 50,000, and twitter is averaging 221 tweets per second, how are you really reading all your beloved followers? By automated scripts, or because you aren’t a master of anything except collecting followers. This is not a reflection of “social media savvy” nor a reflection of how effective they are at whatever it is they claim they do – be it real estate, loan sharking, web development, or ESPECIALLY SEO, SEM, or Social Media in general – if you compare some of the “top ten” or “top 25″ “experts” in various blogs you’ll see one of two things – they’re either the same list with the “obvious” experts (like my list) or full of self-claimed experts that tend to have a lot of seminars/webinars to show *you* how you can have google paying you fat checks for a measly $150!

Quality is What Counts – NOT Quantity

I’m really reinforcing that quantity issue – it’s the quality of who you follow that benefits you the most, as well as the quality of your tweets. Tweeting is the new blogging – and just as people blog about their cats, their daily lives, their secrets, people twitter the same things, so you WILL see mundane tweets, from even those that tweet about subject matter you’re interested in. People you find/follow on twitter that either speak of the subject you’re interested in, answer your questions, will post links to their blogs as well as remarkable links worthy of reading. What people post is important – after all, if they share every mundane article/image/digg/Retweet it waters down their quality as well.

The First Rule of Tweet Club

You have to tweet to play (okay, not really). By no means do I consider myself a twitter master, as I still tweet fairly mundanely – it’s my way of letting off steam, 140 characters at a time. But I also follow some pretty cool people, and have found some articles worth saving, some tips worth knowing, and some people worth finding. Won’t you be my twitter neighbor?

I’ve been on twitter since sometime in 2008 (I assume, this is as far back as twitter is showing me).

In that time, I’ve added a ton of followers, and constantly sorting through the requests I’ve received. I don’t follow everyone. Particularly “Gurus” with thousands of following/followers. I don’t follow people who primarily use Twitterfeed so it’s just a stream of RSS posts. I don’t follow spammers (naturally) or people that do nothing except hock their site, their product(s) or their friend(s) similar products, and I especially do not follow self-claimed gurus, be it social media, seo, sem, etc.

The people I follow on twitter fall into a few categories:

• I know them personally.
• I know them professionally.
• They are an understood expert in their field(s) like:
  • Web Development (Particularly Javascript Framework Developers)
  • SEO
  • SEM
  • Analytics
  • Social Media

Particular niches I subscribe to, and I have developed a small list of experts that I’d trust what they say (and occasionally toss questions to them). I consider this list to be “obvious” experts – they’ve proven themselves professionally, or have written at length in blogs about the topic.

My Obvious SEO Experts on Twitter

1. Matt Cutts (from Google)
2. Rand Fishkin (from SEO Moz)
3. Aaron Wall (from SEOBook)
4. SearchEngineLand (from itself)
5. Jennifer Laycock (from Search Engine Guide)
6. Mark Scholl (from EnginePoint Marketing)

I’ve limited the list to six – because I feel they cover a breadth of knowledge that you could gain, mainly from their blog postings – sometimes, 140 characters isn’t enough (some times it is).

I’ll work out additional “Obvious Twitter People to follow” in the future.

No, I don’t mean the fashion statement – I mean the company! (har har, I know, bad keif)

The thing is – they did a tour, “Plaid Nation 2008″ and trekked across state lines from Washington to Nevada,  and for little over a week, they twittered, they blogged, they filmed (they had a live van feed!). An ecstasy of social media and tech geek-ness. This is the first modern road trip I’ve heard of doing this approach, a kind of modern day Ken Kesey and The Merry Pranksters albeit perhaps minus the psychdelics. It just reeked of an awesome, modern day traveling social media party. Geeks on wheels. Nerds on boad. The kind of thing that makes me constantly ask “why haven’t I moved to the west coast yet?”

Ken Kesey and The Merry Prankster

In their venture, they managed to interview Robert Scoble (you know who he is, right?), Cathy Brooks from Seesmic and Biz Stone (of his many involvements -  Twitter, Xanga, Blogger, Odeo, and Obvious) – a little wet dream of the kind of people that brand makers and shakers would love to be involved with (or pick their brain for a moment – which Plaid did, and shared).

Is this the first event of its kind? Well, not exactly. We’ve had these kind of “live road shows” (*cough*merrypranksters*cough*) but also a lot of faux reality shows try to mimic this kind of unscripted approach to topics and interviews, but this is a pure, online approach that I really want to catch from the beginning next year (they have a countdown timer on the home page! Keep your eye on next year’s tour).

One thing I definitely dig – they have online freebies – wallpapers, buddy icons and even the 2008 theme song up for download! It’s this little cool features that most campaigns miss out on (I don’t know why, maybe because they’re simple, quick and easy?).

So do yourself a favor – grab a cup of coffee and scan through the video interviews for a slew of cool ideas and information – and keep your eye open for Plaid Nation ‘09 – maybe I’ll be lucky enough to head out to the coast and catch one of the tweetups!

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along-Blog!

This is something I have twitter to thank for – I stumbled on it from some random tweet, watched out of sheer morbid curiosity (it starts out like a vlog… Neil Patrick Harris as Dr. Horrible reading his email).

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

It was once the singing kicked in that I loved it. It’s like “The Tick” from the villain’s point of view – just trying to be recognized as a villain, and have a personal life. I can’t say too much, but if this is where the future of generated online series goes – I’m loving it.

Part tragedy, part musical – it comes together in just under 40 minutes. Great performances, great music – and the idea behind the series was that:

The idea was to create something small and inexpensive, yet professionally done, in a way that would circumvent the issues that were being protested during the strike.

They succeeded, and I can’t wait for part two (or the DVD to come out so I can actually purchase it :D