What’s in a Twitter reputation?

I noticed something about Twitter users with huge followings: they typically follow very few people.  Why is this?  Seems to me that they are using Twitter as part of their brand, as a place for them to be, rather than as a tool for them to benefit from.  They’re not there to collect news, or get stock updates, or follow their favorite personalities …they are those personalities.  How do you make this leap?

I did a little study.  Of the top 100 user names on Twitter with the most followers, how many people do they follow?  Here are some interesting stats:

• The top 20 users have an average of 1,015,599 followers (that race to 1 million seems kind of old now, huh?)
• 16 of those users follow less than 500 people themselves
• Statistically, there is no correlation between the number of followers of the top 100 and the number of updates they’ve kicked out (r-squared = -0.06 for the nerds)
• 82 of the top 100 follow less than 0.5% of the number of followers they have
• Those 82 have an average of 616,456 followers while only following an average of 259 people

One user I follow, @doshdosh, writes some excellent stuff about Twitter, and online marketing in general.  I stumbled across @doshdosh when I was searching for relevant Twitter articles to see if I wanted to get on Twitter or not.  While I’d suggest going to the site and consuming all of the articles there (doshdosh.com), there’s a great point about the top personalities on Twitter made in this piece:  

“…these Twitter users built their large audience through their already established popularity. They didn’t start from the ground up: it’s likely that they started with a decent amount of followers and will continue to accumulate them passively through the strength of their reputation or personal brand.”

Of course, you’re saying, you can’t follow more than a few dozen people and have a manageable timeline anyway.  Follow 377,644 people like Britney Spears, and there’s a good chance you can’t read everyone’s updates in your timeline (just guessing).  And there even seems to be a limit of about 2000 followers on Twitter, meant to keep people from mass-following to get mass-followers.

But whether these massively popular users could follow many people or not doesn’t really address what I’m going for here.  It’s about how you perceive someone when they have lots of followers, and follow few people.

Now think about this:  say you’ve never heard of someone (i.e. they’re not a celebrity), and you find their profile on Twitter, and see they have 450,000 followers.  You probably think: “wow, this person is popular.”  But then you look at their “friends”, and see they follow only 200 people… are you more or less likely to follow them?  Does the “strength of their reputation” hinge on how few people they follow?  Is there a snob appeal in saying “I have thousands of followers, and I can do it without following thousands of people”?  And more importantly, does that make you want to be part of that following?

My own personal rule is that if someone doesn’t engage their followers (look at their timeline and look for the “@”; no @’s, no engagement), I don’t bother following them.  I’m the kind of person that likes to interact.  Should it matter if I’m a “big-time personality” on Twitter or not?  I don’t think so.  If I’m interested in your topic and make a pithy comment or ask you an intriguing question, I expect a response.  

But not everyone is that way.  Some follow you to get followed, some just want to listen, and some just want to talk.  I want my Twitter experience to be engaging, informational, and about sharing with others.

 

Manny suspended for steroids… are we there yet?

As a kid you ask your parents on a long, arduous ride: “Are we there yet?”  Well, this baseball steroids thing is a long arduous ride, and since baseball is supposed to make you feel like a kid, I’m asking “Are we there yet”?  Every week there’s a new player that we look up to who is found to be juicing.

The homerun king – Barry Bonds – juiced (albeit allegedly)
The homerun king heir apparent – Alex Rodriguez – juiced
One of the best pitchers ever – Roger Clemens – juiced
Guys you loved to watch play – Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Sammy Sosa(?), Rafael Palmiero – juiced
Widely regarded as the best pure right-handed hitter in the last 50 years – Manny Ramirez – juiced

By the way, if you want a history with all the sordid details, from the Mitchell report to the new book about A-Rod, this site does a phenomenal job of it. 

It’s getting to the point where you have to question everything and everybody.  Sure, the vast majority of players don’t take performance enhancing drugs, but enough of the “good” ones do that the line between good performance and good performance-enhancers is so blurred right now, we can’t tell if we’re enjoying the game anymore or these guys’ physicians.

We root for players (in addition to our teams) beacuse they have a good story.  We get behind them, we root for them.  Sometimes, when they’re doing something remarkable, we tune in just because we want to witness history (see: the McGwire/Sosa single season home run record race, which may or may not have saved baseball after the 1994 strike).  And then we witness history, and we tell our friends about it… then 31 months later, we find out the whole thing was tainted because the stories we fell in love with were missing a key ingredient: the juice.  Remember Floyd Landis, anyone?

At this point, would anybody be surprised if Michael Phelps were shown to have been juicing?

Kids can’t sail, can curse like sailors

I just saw Role Models and couldn’t help notice how much the child actors cursed.  If I had the time, I would have compared how much R-rated stuff was said by Paul Rudd and Stifler (sorry Sean William Scott, you’ll always be Stifler) versus the two child actors Christopher Mintz-Plasse, 19, and Bobb’e J. Thompson, 12 (both of which, by the way, need new Hollywood names).   Let’s just say the shock value of the kids cursing was definitely meant to be part of the humor, and many times, Rudd and Scott were the set-up men.

It’s Prequel season – which movie packs the biggest promise?

It’s “Big Summer Movie” season, which means action movies, remakes, sequels and prequels.  This last weekend, Wolverine grossed $87 million on opening weekend.  A few other notable prequels in the last few years pulls are below:

Slop and Scare: the Swine Flu gets messy

The Swine Flu is making news all over the world.  A strain of influenza that started in Mexico has claimed over 100 Mexican lives since April 13th.  40 cases have been reported in the US, and 8 localized in a high school in NY, but no deaths (see here for a “tracker“).  Like SARS, pervasive global travel makes a local epidemic global very quickly, and authorities now suggest not bothering to try to contain the spread of the virus.   The world has responded as such: