How I decide on friend requests
As we've mentioned here recently, Twitter use has exploded at the agency. Facebook preceded it, and I hear the same questions now that I heard when people were building their Facebook networks. How do you find people to follow? And the more important question, how do I determine if I should follow someone, especially someone that follows me?
These questions, a post by Mark Glaser this week, and the in-process BusinessWeek story on Twitter, inspired me to type up my rules for determining who to follow and whether to follow those who starting following me. Follow?
[For those not familiar with Twitter, I've embedded a nice video at the end of this post to explain.]
1. Is someone going to offer me value? I can tell by looking at the first screenful of tweets. Are the majority about business issues relevant to me or serious things that interest me? If not, I'll pass on following.
2. Is someone going to help me do my job better? If there is a reporter or blogger I can follow and get to know better because they're on Twitter, I'll follow them. If there is a smart social media practitioner who can help me keep up with the lightning fast developments changing this world every day, I'll follow them. If there is someone who gives me more insight into strategic, global trends, I'll follow them.
3. Is someone entertaining and related to a particular interest of mine? I recently discovered a great video blog about wine, which is an emerging hobby, done by a very entertaining sommelier named Gary Vaynerchuk. I later discovered he is on Twitter, so started following him (@garyvee). I haven't regretted it.
4. Is someone already part of my business network? This is a no-brainer.
5. For those that follow me, and I want to determine whether to follow them back, what is their "following" to "follower" ratio? If it's a high number, I'm immediately suspicious because they are either a spammer or random person of no particular relevance to me. No thanks.
I'm adopting another rule as well -- a great one I saw from Max Kalehoff, VP of marketing at Clickable, on Twitter yesterday. "If I follow you and you become actively misaligned with me, I'll probably stop following you very quickly."
Anyway, fwiw. I think those rules could be adapted for any other social network (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) as well.

Perhaps it is coincidence, or perhaps it's another example of how news delivery is changing. We've seen how the nightly news delivers stories in flashy snippets and how the sports component is reduced to a mere 3-4 minutes (thanks SportsCenter). We've seen the demise of the morning news program, illustrated so vividly by Dana Milbank in
It's always great to catch up with Chris Shipley, exec producer of the
I've never been a fan of the blind pitch. And for many of us it's one of the numerous reasons we talk to our clients about how best to engage media, media that blog, and even non-media types that blog. From my perspective at least, it should be about creating meaningful conversations and lasting relationships.
The Publicity Club of New England

As an advance guard for our clients in the social media world, I am doing my best to try the various communication vehicles so we can advise them appropriately. So I'm not only in 