The Follow Culture. Part 3.

(The final entry in the series on why people follow, continued from part 1 and part 2.)

I can’t Qwit you.

Yes you can. It’s easy. Let me show you how. When it comes to people following me, I never expected as many as I have. Seriously. Great if it happened, otherwise, it really was no big deal.

Having said that, if you ended up following me, thanks, but don’t get mad if I don’t follow back. (Although at times, I've had issues with glitches when it comes to follows, so it’s likely people fell through the cracks along the way. Don’t hate.)

One example of how crazy people can get over this point though happened recently. Someone followed then unfollowed me three times in one day. (I'd been on assignment and was away from the laptop, only to return to 100+ emails. Not four hours later after their initial follow, I noticed the person had followed then unfollowed me twice—before I even had a chance to follow them. Like they were trying to get my attention in some kind of weird “Next time you see our waitress, could you tell her we need the check?” way when you’re at Pizza Hut.

Good luck with that. Please, at least let me insult you first so I can earn the unfollow the old-fashioned way.

As it is, I use Qwitter, which allows you to see when someone unfollows so you can return the favor, just to mess with them. (Something Facebook doesn’t like to offer or encourage its users to do because of precisely this type of crap with the nearly internet famous.) Qwitter’s exit interview though is limited because it only lets you know when someone stopped following after your last update.

(Could be they stopped following you for another reason besides what you wrote, like, maybe you never followed them, or maybe you like fictional creatures like the centaur. For this, Qwitter needs an itemized list with checkboxes so you can work on improving yourself and choice of favorite pet.)

It’ll get worse before it gets better.

Just like the economy I suppose, but as more and more companies jump on the social media bandwagon, there’ll be no end in sight to the pointless follows that do no more than inflate someone’s numbers. After all, who needs meaningful content when you’re following 13,004 people—and one of them is Anderson Cooper.

There’s one thing affecting this scenario though that seems to be missing from most social media enthusiast, guru and expert posts, and while a topic for a future post, is relevant here:

Everyone uses the online space in their own way.

You do it with it want you want, and I’ll do with it what I want. There are no set rules other than just to use common sense. (Wait, scratch that. It’s the internet, what was I thinking.

It’s not one size fits all, yet that’s what I see on blogs or other publications and magazines* in love with the “Customer is in charge now!” mantra. (Funny how it sounds an awful lot like the second coming of “The customer is always right.”)

On one hand you have people who could care less about Facebook or Twitter and are content to just write their blog. On the other, you have PR people shilling endlessly and retweeting everything Seth Godin says—at 2:00 am on a Saturday night. Then there’s everything in betweet.**

What’s it all means.

Summing things up nicely, well, you can’t. I went off in all different directions in these posts because there isn’t one way to approach it. The reasons why people are seemingly obsessed with who they follow and who follows them are many. There’s also no one site that it happens with either. That’s not a cop-out, it’s just that all of this is connected organically and not caused by any one thing because people are on more than one site at a time.

This culture of following permeates everything online, and is the basis for a lot of what shapes community experiences with social media, not just how many people you follow or what brands poke you on Facebook.

Again, the needs for every group vary. Advertisers don’t care if an individual is bummed because they only have 20 friends. Most brands are only interested in the largest numbers of eyes that key influencers supposedly deliver from a business standpoint.

For their part, the individual user with the 20 “friends” could care less about that because to them, it’s personal, not business.

On the other hand, maybe they’re okay with that 20 because they don’t care all that much about being online. Whichever group you’re talking about though, no followers equals no community, and no community ultimately equals no interest from anyone—advertisers or “influencers.”

Who’s right? Both? Neither?











Another prevailing mindset is that there are certain ways to use social media and certain ways not to, and that’s it. I don’t think you can apply hard and fast rules like that though.

Unless you’re a celebrity of any sort, micro, real, imagined or whatever, it’s not one thing or the other that guarantees you or your brand will be popular online, let alone “getting it right” when it comes to promoting your product.

For every Shaq, there’s a real fake Britney. For every Zappos, there’s a Pepsi. Brands attend a seminar or read an article on How To Do Social Media, then panic when the community at large doesn’t react the way they thought it would, especially when a fake character starts following them.

Works for Mad Men, others, not so much.

You could also do everything on a *yawn* Top 10 Ways To Use Social Media or Top 10 Twitter Tips list*** and still not get it right. A list I purposely avoided including because nobody’s Top 10 is the same. Five things on it might be, but then after that? Your call.

Those things are popular because they’re easy SEO-friendly topics that help drive blog traffic, even if they are recycling the same topics. Others live to spread tips on How To Get 10,000 Followers in Two Days—GUARANTEED!

10,000 followers? In only two days? Guaranteed? And to think mom said you wouldn’t amount to anything.


*If I had to call out everyone who does it, I’d have to go to part 4 in this series, and as much as I can’t predict the future, I can tell you that ain’t happening.

**The other hell of social media: Cute names and language specific to the site. You dig, my Tweeps?

***They have these lists at 7-Eleven—next to the Slim Jims.