My idea: turn Follow Friday into a single tweet with a link to a blog post of the people you think others should follow.

It solves two problems: It gives you more than 140 to talk about the people you recommend, and it also cleans up Twitter so that we don’t watch a stream of @someoneawesome names rushing by all day.

You with me?

Here are some people from my list (and just a few to get the game going):

@Ed – Ed Shahzade is part of the glue of Twitter. He’s a connector and a do-er. He helps people all the time.

@MayhemStudios – Calvin Lee is a great source of information. He scours twitter quite often to find the good stuff and share it out. I learn something from him all the time.

@donmilleris – Don Miller is one of my current author crushes, and he wrote A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, one of my top 2 books for 2010.

@badbanana – Tim Siedell is just plain funny. I love his sense of humor, and he’s totally worth it.

@lmarconi – Lucia Marconi had the guts to tell me she thought I was being a bit egotistical lately, and that she liked my ideas, but sometimes felt put off by my ego. She then wrote a great blog post telling me more ideas. And we had a great back and forth on Twitter. I’m grateful. I can get but-kissing all day long, but she had a constructive, real, solid, non-jealous criticism, and I needed to hear it. Thanks, Lucia.

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There you go. That’s a list. It’s just a starter. Make your own. Find the good people. Find people who need the attention. Find people who matter to you. Share the locals. Use public Twitter lists (if the lists are not judgment-based, such as “smart people”).

Promote others. It really does help the system.

He has a @toysoldiergames Twitter account that he’s working on using for other promotions and to educate his customer base. I think it will do super well.

This isn’t rocket surgery kids (as my Boston friends say). This is marketing. It’s deadly sniper-level good marketing, because Mick makes it about MY comics, and about Ray’s Warhammer 40K miniatures, and about other people’s specific stuff.

And Mick runs a small store with just a few employees. If he can find the time to sell this way, you have to really think about it.

Think he sells more than people who don’t do this? I’m guessing yes. You?

I’m sitting here at Zemoga‘s offices in Colombia. I realized that I wanted to be able to find a “Team Zemoga” list, click on it, and then dump the entire team into a list on my Seesmic Desktop. I realize that I can follow other people’s public lists, but the functionality is just a bit too clunky still.

I want the ability to take a Twitter list and share it as a new “team” list, with the ability to quickly manage the “follow/followback” as well as the ability to DM them almost like they’re IM users.

Make sense? Is this just me?

But there are lots of ways to use it. Do you need to find more case studies? Here’s a simple search for case studies: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=”case+study”+filter:links

Do you want to know who’s talking about burgers near San Francisco? http://search.twitter.com/search?q=burger+near:SF+filter:links”

Want some negative proof? I sniffed around for “site sucks” – http://search.twitter.com/search?q=”site+sucks” – to see who’s saying what about bad websites (note: don’t forget to speak the way your tweeters would speak).

Maybe you’re in pharma? I checked out “allergies plus meds OR medication – http://search.twitter.com/search?q=allergies+medication+OR+meds”

There are lots more opportunities to consider. One of my favorites? http://search.twitter.com/search?q=”looking+for”. It’s like permission to sell. Right there. (If you’re not a jerk.)

Oh that Twitter. Such a silly tool. Why even bother? (Keep telling yourself that.)

Bonus Round

Save your searches. Cook them up and put them in your Google Reader or your Seesmic Desktop or your Tweetdeck. Build STATIONS around these kinds of searches. Build response protocols for them. (I’ve barely scratched the surface, but wanted to start somewhere).

And you? Success stories?

Following doesn’t equal engagement.

If you follow someone on Twitter, it simply means that the person has the permission/right to direct message you. It doesn’t mean necessarily that you’ll see every tweet the person sends.

I’ve been on both sides of the auto-follow fence. Do I follow everyone back because it’s polite? Do I not follow everyone back because then I get lots of DM spam? Currently (Feb 2010), I’m auto-following people back, because I got a wave of people saying, “I’m so glad you followed me. I appreciate the two-way street.”

But there’s the rub, isn’t it?

How I View Following Back

When I choose to follow, it’s because I grant you the permission to send me a direct message. I will not likely see your standard every day tweets. At over 110,000 followed, it’s a technical and mathematical impossibility.

So, when I follow you back, it means that I’ve given you one step up on the hurdle. But that’s not the whole game.

Engagement is what Many Seem to Value

When people said they wanted Tom Peters to follow them back, they were saying (most likely) that they wanted to know that Tom would engage with them. Know what the measure of engagement is?

@

That’s it. If your stream is full of @replies, then you’re more of the engaging type. Check out my twitter stream. It’s about 80% @replies on any given day. (Mind you, Robert Scoble says I’m doing Twitter wrong.).

However, Is ENGAGEMENT the Big Value?

Engagement, talking back and forth to you, is maybe what YOU value, because you want social media to be a place where you feel seen. And that’s the absolute beauty of social media tools, especially Twitter: they let us jump gates and connect to people who matter.

But what if Tom Peters’ Twitter stream is full of useful nuggets and links to really useful stuff. Is it any less valuable?

I visited CNN headquarters a few months ago and saw what they followed in their news streams. Believe me, they don’t care who follows them back on their news-only accounts. They valued the information they could use. The story’s a bit different if you ask Rick Sanchez, who is using Twitter amazingly.

But my point is: the information is more important in many cases.

So Ask Yourself the Goal

Ask yourself what you’re seeking in the people you follow. If it’s conversations, ask whether it’s the follow, or just the realization that if you’ve got something worth talking about that the person will reply back to you. It’s not like everyone can reply back all the time, but if we do it more than we don’t, that’s probably good, right?

Ask yourself what you value in your use of the tools, but then realize that you’re working from what YOU value, and it might not be the same for everyone. ( Guy Kawasaki reminds me of this every time he talks about Twitter.)

What say you?

This got me thinking: if I could “pocket” my data, restrict certain tweets to certain geographies on the OUTBOUND side of Twitter, then that’d be neat. I mean, most smartphone apps of Twitter have my location. What if they could say to the API, “Only send this to people within 25 miles of this location?”

Then, at CES, I could opt for “geopocketed” tweets, so that you don’t get bored to death about hearing where I am, who I’m meeting up with, etc, but then I can tweet to the “unlocal” people the “news” that I find. See where I’m going?

What if we had a way to geo-restrict our OUTGOING tweets for certain uses?

Photo credit heiwa4126

I have a hundred thousand followers on Twitter. I follow back about 93,000. I don’t see most of what you tweet about. I use search and lists to keep up with what I can, but the software API can’t even serve all your tweets to me.

But there’s value in that number. I get value in the following ways:

• You find the good stuff for me, so I can learn more.
• You promote social causes that I support if they resonate with you.
• You visit the great voices I share with you, growing their audience and potential for relationship.
• You help spread important news like Amber alerts fast.
• You support the better of my posts. (Heck, sometimes you support my posts that I don’t even like.)
• You keep me in the loop and talk with me when we both have a moment.

I get tons of value from Twitter every day. Heck, just today, I mentioned on Twitter that I’ve made the Roger Smith Hotel my exclusive hotel in NYC, and that spurred a new conversation with a hotel in Boston. I spoke to the folks at Legal Seafoods, after they noticed I recommended them to a friend visiting Boston. Now, they’re going out to buy my book, and so I offered to swing by and sign it and talk.

I get value every day from Twitter. It’s my serendipity engine. It’s my liner notes.

Where Seth is right, however, is that bullhorns are stupid and useless.

But no value in Twitter? Not on my watch.

No, I don’t have time to chat, even though my tweets seem conversational. No, I’m not able to take a quick phone call.

I’m multithreading. I know it looks like I’m just tweeting to tweet, or adding comments or facebooking or any of the other things we do in social media, but I’m also doing my job.

Tweeting is part of my job.

I’ll always connect when I’ve a moment. You’re just as important as ever.

Please just understand that work looks a lot different from my desk than yours some days.

So, essentially, they give you a copy of Tweetdeck pre-loaded with a list assembling some musical artists. THAT makes it neat.

You see how you could do this for your customers, right? For your boss? For the person who needs to “get” social apps like Twitter?

What would your list look like? What OTHER kinds of lists could you make that would pre-populate the recipient’s mind with a new understanding of what it all means?

What about RSS? Can you think of building a pack of good blogs to follow? You can do that with Alltop, for instance. Here’s my list.

Doing just a bit of extra work would make a huge difference. Don’t you agree?

I am wrong from time to time. This time was one of them.