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Drive-by Tweeting
The other day when I posted my article about startups being like ice cream factories, a famous person from the startup community sent me a tweet. Something like "Great article! Keep it up!"
This was awesome! As a rule, I'm very stingy about who I follow. It's not that I don't like folks, I just like using Twitter as a conversation tool and not an endless stream. But here was famous person X telling me how awesome I am! I went immediately over to Twitter and started to click the "follow" button.
But then I caught myself.
You see, this was not the first time I've had a famous person pop over with a compliment. I really like this -- hey I can use the encouragement! -- but Joe Sixpack tweeting me with an "Awesome, man!" and famous person X doing the same thing are different things entirely.
Why? Take a look at what happens next. I click "like" or "follow" and become part of 27,421 other people following famous person X. Personal conversation with that person then ends.
I have nothing against the person who tweeted, and like I said, I'm immensely thankful. The guy that tweeted to me is a truly nice person whose work I admire. But there's a bit of game theory going on in social media. Eyeballs have value. If you are not careful, your stream becomes polluted with all sorts of people who just randomly said something nice to you one day.
It works pretty nice from the other end. If you're famous person X and building a mailing list! Hell, I might even try it myself someday. Take an hour each day and tweet, IM, or email authors of articles I see on HN and tell them how awesome they are. I bet you could pick up between 20 and 30 new followers a day. Do this for a month or two and soon the network effect would start to take hold.
But if you're not into noisy streams, as a recipient you have to resist the urge to follow when approached like this, especially from people with huge followings. (Or who are building huge followings.)
Yes, it's a good thing, but there's no such thing as a free lunch. You've probably just been a victim of a drive-by-tweet. :)
hacker
Daniel Markham
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