Do you follow? Or get followed?
It’s sort of ironic that the respected journalist who has a best-selling book analyzing how the PC has made the world flat has 14,490 followers on Twitter and follows no one. No one?
Thomas Friedman, Nobel Prize winning journalist, New York Times Op-Ed columnist and author of The World is Flat , was listed among the top 100 best Twitter users according to Foreign Policy’s ranking, which TMP Outreach Director Kristen Coco highlighted recently, and yet his tweets are really just a list of his Op-Ed articles. Not much else.
The intention is not to pick on Friedman. He is obviously brilliant and is certainly not alone in the disproportionate ratio of follows to followers on his Twitter account. In fact, most of the Foreign Policy list is a who’s who of already well established journalists and politicians who “get followed.” These luminaries, for the most part, already had prominent channels to voice their opinions. So, for all the hype around Twitter as a democratizing tool, Foreign Policy’s selection of the best Twitter users and the way people on that list use Twitter, seems to re-enforce the skeptic’s argument: Twitter is really just another form of “push” rather than “pull” media. It’s certainly neat, of course, to get live updates from @WhiteHouse, even if I know it’s just a staffer posting the latest message and not President Obama himself.
The way Twitter is designed does hold much more promise of a “flattening” tool than the way many of the users highlighted in Foreign Policy actually use it.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (@pmharper) seems more receptive to this point with a Follow: Follower ratio of 13,336: 17,342. A much more reasonable ratio in an environment where the strength of social networks are the conversations they encourage. It seems then, that @tomfriedman, @algore (9 follows to 1,423,746 followers ), @bbcworld (0 to 43,384) and @gatesfoundation (41 to 10,713) among others, are missing out on the exchange of ideas beyond their offline circles.
But I guess, they don’t have to care about that. Or do they?
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Great points, Lauren! I will admit that I use Twitter in a way to boost my followers and spread my ideas and what I find that I think is useful to more people. But I also use it as a research and monitoring tool. Now that I have TweetDeck not just running but optimized, I can segment the different types of people I follow. So, I have a group for International Media Development, International Development, Social Media, News and Commentary, Marketing, and others. I can stay on top of what key people are saying in each of these categories. But more importantly, I choose carefully who I follow, which makes this a great research tool. So, I follow people who Tweet useful links to articles in each of these categories, and I learn all kinds of useful stuff. Like, how to use social media if you are a nonprofit, or what are the latest research reports on media development in the Middle East. Basically, using Twitter, I’ve turned it into a tool where people do my research for me.
For my money, it’s about getting a lot of followers, and following a lot of key/useful people. Frankly, I think these are the most effective ways of using Twitter.