Comments on: Measuring Thought Leadership

By: Pete Ashton

Pete Ashton — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 02:28:27 +0000

Thanks for dragging some useful shit out of my ramblings guys!

By: Alex Hillman

Alex Hillman — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 17:23:31 +0000

Echoing what Anil said, i keep my follow list low on purpose…not to be defined as a “thought leader”, but because the value of twitter for me is in my followers, not the people i’m following. What do I mean?

Well an increased number of people im following only dilutes the pool of information I’m trying to receive. The already intense firehose of information becomes so saturated that the entire stream loses value.

On the opposite side, having a large and more importantly, diverse group of followers increases my ability to use twitter as a “lazyweb”, asking questions and getting feedback more relevantly than even google can give me.

The real trouble is what Anil described in that real life social tension. I do not follow everyone back. I have a loose “follow” policy that I try to adhere to to keep things easy for me. What it really comes down to, is, is that person contributing to or initiating conversations that are interesting to me. it has little to do with friendship, really. I’ve got awesome friends. They know who they are. Facebook can manage that…twitter is for something else.

The problem I’ve run into is this: while I find it easy to not follow someone back initially when they follow me…I find it excruciatingly difficult to UNFOLLOW someone. The pain is in the fact that it feels like a mimicked real world social experience of a breakup. When in fact, i dont care any less about the person, their tweets simply have lost relevance to the conversation i need to be focused on *right now*.

This is just one more reason twitter needs groups. Or better relationship management. Or to scale back to the whole model of being a communication platform, and have someone else be the interface that handles the relationship layer.

By: Anil

Anil — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 15:57:03 +0000

Interesting insights, Pete. And for what it’s worth, the kind of interaction you described with me is, for example why I didn’t go to SXSW for a few years — I have a hard time making those real connections with people these days because in some contexts, the ratio of people I know to people who know me is so assymetrical. It’s nobody’s fault but my own, of course, but I do wish that I *could* spend more time learning from, and talking to, folks like you whom I’ve “known” online for years.

There’s also even a real-life social tension to the 10-1 ratio of Twitter followers/followees, because then when I meet people in person, they’ll say “I follow you, how come you don’t follow me?” And it’s hard to explain that, basically, I *can’t* reciprocate with everybody, or the tool would become useless to me.

And as far as “Though Leadership” goes, I don’t know if I’m that full of good ideas, but I do know that the ability to influence people is really constrained by how well you make a real connection with them. It may be that I have too many lightweight, superficial connections to be as successful as a thought leader as I might otherwise hope to be.

Good food for thought!