You are SO unfollowed!

Type:	Industry Articles
You are SO unfollowed! Scobleizer.com by Robert Scoble on August 5, 2009 Whew, it’s been a while since I’ve done a good old fashioned blog. I’ve been busy, though. Posting tons of videos, both on my personal site on Blip.tv as well as professional videos over on building43.com. Last night I put up a live video of USA’s new CTO speaking to a bunch of Silicon Valley geeks, too. That’s on my Kyte.tv channel, along with a bunch of others I put up there during a recent London trip. More on all those later, for now I have another topic I wanted to talk about: On Monday I unfollowed 106,000 people on Twitter. The reaction so far has been quite interesting. More than 7,000 accounts have unfollowed me back. They did that so fast that I assume they are just bots that are looking to increase their follower numbers. I knew I’d lose them, but that’s sort of why I did it. People who are following me just to get another count on their follower numbers are just plain, well, lame. But it’s worse than that. When I unfollowed everyone all my spam just stopped. Dead. No more spam. Not since Monday. Twitter is actually quite enjoyable. Not a single DM spam. Not a single piece of spam has come through the home page. See, after my script finished running (I paid SocialToo to run a script that unfollowed everyone) I hand followed back specific people. I’m already up to about 1,600 people that I’m following again. But here’s the rub, I’m getting 100x better inbound. Why? No spam. We’ve covered that already. Because I personally care about everyone I am following their noise level is a LOT lower. Think about it. Hearing from some stranger that they ate a peanut butter sandwich isn’t very interesting. Hearing that from someone you care about, like, say, my brother, is a lot more interesting. Because I’m now hand following smart people I’m learning stuff from my Twitter account again. What is a “smart person?” More on that in second. I can actually closely follow 1,600 and read almost every tweet from them and can even pretty easily catch up on those that I missed due to sleeping, or those I missed due to flying somewhere (I’m typing this from Boulder Colorado, so was in the air about 3 hours and I very quickly caught up once on the ground). Catching up with 100,000 people is totally impossible, you only can see random tweets. It has even made my FriendFeed time more fun. Why? Because now I can see how to use them together even better (my Twitter favorites, for instance, now are turned into an RSS feed and pushed into FriendFeed where my audience there talks about those items — something that can’t happen on Twitter itself, funny enough). I’m now doing a rethink of my entire following behavior on other systems, like FriendFeed and Facebook as well. This has made me more productive. Since my inbound is better, I’m going to start blogging again too. Why? Because I’ll have time, for one, and for two, I’m getting smarter again so want to share what I’m seeing with other people. OK, so what makes a “smart” person? First, a disclaimer, I shouldn’t use that term. It’s elitist. I used it to hurt some people who I’m not following, because, well, they were bringing me noise or insults or both. So, we need a new term. Hmmm. How about “what makes a ‘followable’ person?” Now that’s better. I’ve found several things. I’m more likely to follow you if you have a well targeted Twitter profile. If you say “fun guy,” sorry, no. But if you say “engineer at Yahoo working on Flickr.” Well, then, I’ll be much more likely to follow you. Now, take it out of geek ville. Let’s say I was looking for quilters to follow. Well, then, I’ll be biased toward people who identify what kind of quilting they do. No picture, no follow. For a brand like BestBuy you better have a logo. Out of 1,600 follows I’ve done this week I’ve only broken that rule a few times and even when I broke this rule it made me think very long and hard about whether following them is worth it. I bias toward following people who DO things in real life. Entrepreneurs. Politicians. Actors. VCs. My list, which you can check yourself, is biased heavily toward people who’ve made something of themselves. If tons of the people I trust (you know I trust them, because I’ve followed them) recommend you, I’ll add you too. So, repetition is important. I look at who YOU follow. Do you follow lots of other geeks and people I like to follow? Then you’re more likely to get me to follow you too. If someone smart keeps retweeting you (like how Dave Winer keeps talking about Jay Rosen) then I’ll follow you too. If you’re a news maker. Hey, I follow Barack Obama. Why? Well, he makes news. Among other things. Same reason why I follow TechCrunch. If you’re powerful, I’ll follow you. I follow both powerful bloggers like Ariana Huffington as well as powerful VCs like Jeff Clavier and powerful executives like Marc Benioff. They probably all will laugh that I called them powerful, but they are. Do you have a brand I like? I notice that I’m adding more and more brands I like like Zoho and Evernote and others. But if they abuse that position I’ll unfollow them first. I look at your last 20 tweets. If you are just talking about your lunch, I probably won’t follow you. But if you’re talking about a project you’re working on and it sounds interesting I’ll follow you. If I’ve met you face-to-face I’m much more likely to follow you. In fact I’ve scanned all my business cards in, thanks to Cloud Contact’s great service, and I’m now matching those up their Twitter accounts and adding them too. Anyway, I’m not the only one unfollowing people this week. I’ve seen quite a discussion of people who have pared back their following list and/or turned off autofollowing services (which I also did — until Monday my Twitter account would automatically follow you back if you followed me, that was great because everyone could DM me, but it brought me a TON of spam that made DM’s unusable and forced this change). For me, my major learning of social networks is that you should be very choosy on who to listen to and who to put into your view. What about you? How do you decide who to follow? Has Twitter gotten too noisy for you yet? Have you changed your approach? Oh, and, I should give kudos to Loic for saying that I was heading down the wrong path. He was right.

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