I'm a passionate about Twitter. I spend more time in on it than in any other social media venue. Twitter has been good to me. It is the source of leads for my text and video blogs, not to mention several very nice consulting and speaking offers.
But the real value is in the friendships I've made and maintained with diverse people all over the world. While Twitter is a virtual space, these friendships are very real or so it seems to me.
Like blogging and Facebook before it, Twitter is suddenly and abruptly enjoying massive adooption or so it appears to many Twitter champions who see a new wave of adopters coming in. This should make us all overjoyed at our newfound groundswells of apparent popularity.
I greet this with ambivalence. As a Twitter champion I am happy to see this accelerating success. But I fear the changes this popularity may bring. I remember the speed of which facebook went from being a wonderfully social place to the haven for camp followers and snake oil peddlars.
For me, Twitter is the most up close and personal of social media. People play and joke there. There's a lot of kidding, teasing and even flirting. We behave like denizen of a small neighborhood, one where it's safe to speak out, where strangers are scrutinized by locals this all happens at a certain easygoing pace.
But now newbie influx appears to be accelrating to avalanche. And they are making it much harder to be up close and personal. I see many new Tweeters who reveal no clear name, no place of residency, no personal photos, no web or blog site. I do not know who they are. I do not know why they wish to follow me. Like most Tweeters I like popularity, but it makes me nervoius when I do not know why you want to follow me.
There was a time when I established a Living Room Policy on this blog because of rude intrusions, then later I declared a FaceBook friend policy, which was not enough to let me enjoyably use that service. Now I find a need to declare a Twitter Follow Policy, which I hereby declare.
- If I do not know who you are, or what you look like, or where you are coming from I will not follow you.
- With very few exceptions, I will not follow brands, candidates, causes or company names. I wish to talk with humans, not brand icons, neither surveys nor bots. If you are a real person & you are passionate about your work, then I embrace you. If you are a Direct Marketer using Twitter to push you brand into my forehead, I will block you.
- Even if you are a real person, I may not follow you. I need to see that you are talking either about topics or people I care about.
- If you disagree with me, do it under your own name and I will respect you. If you personally insult me, I will block you. If you are consistently unpleasant or just boring, I will unfollow or block you.
- With extremely rare exception, I will not follow anonymous Tweeters.
