Wednesday, December 14, 2011

My 3 Pronged Approach to Effectively Using Twitter...

28 days ago I started a personal challenge to "take on Twitter" with the goal of acquiring 100 followers by December 31, 2011 (currently at 63 and counting @jwhichard).

During this quest I have pontificated about my strategies to achieve this goal the "right way". To be fair to my critics, my version of the "right way" has taken on many shapes and forms to date including:

1) I am only going to count followers with a link back to my focus around Fundraising, Nonprofits, Marketers, etc ("etc" defined as friends, family and Justin Beiber).

2) I am aiming for a 2 to 1 ratio (for every two followers I have I can only follow 1 fellow "tweeter")

3) I am going to use #Bold as my hashtag so I will show up as a trending topic (this one created the most "lol's")!

Simply stated, my goal is to be a focused voice targeting a relevant audience to innovate change in marketing/fundraising and use this medium to share and shape my thoughts and ideas into something much better than I can create on my own.

Twitter would become my own marketing agency made up of a larger collective experience pool!

My detractors and doubters (and there are many) who have snickered as I ask for proper Twitter etiquette around the use of "RT" and @ mentions have told me this quality over quantity approach is all wrong.

And now Seth Godin has come to my defense!

In a recent post, The Trap of Social Media Noise he states there are two types of people in social media in what he refers to as "The Game Theory":

The game theory pushes us into one of two directions: either be better at pump and dump than anyone else, get your numbers into the millions, outmass those that choose to use mass and always dance at the edge of spam (in which the number of those you offend or turn off forever keep increasing),

or

Relentlessly focus. Prune your message and your list and build a reputation that's worth owning and an audience that cares.


Seth refers to the former group who follow the "pump and dump" as "Junk Dealers"...for those who have spent years optimizing, competing for fundraising dollars have fought junk mail and faced this "noise" in what we call "competition in the mailbox".

Nothing ever good came from Junk Mail...the volume never helped keep paper costs or postal rates down, it made people more skeptical or less trusting of every mail piece they received, it was the cause for the inception of many 'Do Not Mail' lists on the market today.

Social networks have proven in a very short time to be very fickle media and the more we "play for numbers" the less relevant it will become and the less engaged we will be.

My suggestion, Be #bold! Be part of the small minority that generates the large majority of the content that really matters!

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