Thursday, February 12, 2009

Interesting Twitter phenom ...

... in essence a Twitter-based chain letter. Harmless, though -- no money involved unless you go for the "upsell" afterward. Your only "investment" is agreement to follow five other participants' tweets, plus whatever effort you choose to put into promoting it.

Oh, yeah, promoting it. I should do that: Here ya go.

Last time I looked (an hour or so after joining) I had picked up seven new followers. Guess I got in somewhere not too far from the ground floor, anyway.

Update: A few further thoughts ...

As you can probably tell, I dabble in "Internet marketing" when I'm not busy saving the world from tyranny.

One of the constant proverbs of Internet marketing is "the money is in the list." Even those like me whose main interest is politics rather than some other kind of widget, know the truth of that. Selling one thing to one person in multiple iterations is a tough row to hoe. Better to build lasting relationships that result in repeat sales (or campaign donations, or volunteer hours, etc.) to the same customers.

Twitter is just a different kind of list, and it has some features that make it better, from the customer end, than bulk email or postal direct mail.

For one thing, all you have to do to get off someone's Twitter list is unfollow them, rather than futzing through some arcane unsubscribe mechanism that may or may not work. If your followers don't like where you lead them, they can dump you with a couple of clicks.

Additionally, since "follow" requests go one way (from "customer" to "vendor"), you don't end up on 14 lists you never asked to be on just because you gave your email address to some spammer who resold it.

Of course, in the chain letter mechanism, Gary McCaffrey (the guy behind TweeterGetter) is building one king-hell list, while those further down the chain build much smaller ones. But hey, that's all right. Looks like I'm at 10 new followers tonight, and counting.

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