Background: during this week’s Twitter experimentation I linked to a lot of people, including Robert Scoble, who’s… well, I’ll feel silly if I explain this because 99% of you probably know who he is. Check Wikipedia if you don’t… please. Suffice it to say he’s a famous blogger and tech enthusiast who’s now doing some interesting stuff for Fast Company and who has gotten a fair bit of coverage in traditional media.
Anyway, I made a comment about being followed by him in Twitter on March 4/08 and got an interesting response, so I thought I’d share this with you.
Here’s the deeper background: I was rather amazed when Scoble started following me (which is like being added to a Facebook Friends list) fairly quickly after I followed him the other day. It happened within minutes. I was amazed considering that this guy has over 11,000 people following him.
So I wandered back over to his Twitter page and checked his stats. Amazingly enough, the number of people that he follows is almost equal to the number of people who follow him.
I have to admit that I wondered if he was running some kind of application that automatically started following Twitter users who followed him, if such a thing even exists. Who knows? Doesn’t really matter, I guess.
I commented on this event and got the interesting response that I mentioned. I copied these three Twitter messages directly from my Twitter favorites, you might find them amusing:
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MarkDykeman I was actually kind of flattered when Scoble started following me shortly after I started following him; then I looked at the ratio….  about 5 hours ago from web   |
Now, it’s fairly common to put the @ symbol in front of a Twitter username to get that person’s attention. I wasn’t actually interested in getting his attention, I was just, well, Tweeting. However, not only did I NOT use the @, I didn’t even use his actual user name, as you will see below:
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Scobleizer @MarkDykeman notes that I follow everyone. That’s true! Although I missed a few. I figure this should be two-way, not promotion only. about 5 hours ago from im in reply to MarkDykeman |
See, the user name is Scobleizer, not Scoble. So, somehow he was monitoring Twitter feeds and picked his name, without a @ to call out attention, out of… numerous Tweets multiplied by more than 11,000 users?
Probably not THAT difficult to do from a technology perspective, but still… the speed of his Tweet really surprised me.
This was the only witty comeback that I could muster:
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MarkDykeman @Scobleizer Um, I don’t know what to say…. that your 11,000+ followers haven’t already read…  about 4 hours ago from web in reply to Scobleizer |
So, you never know who you’ll brush up against on the Web. And I got some free publicity out of his Tweet, despite how I might have sounded in my somewhat sarcastic comment, since the Tweet did go out to 11,000+ people… And apparently there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
Which all goes to show that this Web world is pretty cool and serves up the occasional surprise.
But if Elvis contacts me by IM, I’m probably going to freak out. A lot.
cool promo hope your blog got some increase in visits.
@SciFiDrive – thanks, we’ll see. It’s purely random, I think.
He probably tracks his actual name as well as his username. I still appreciate his principle of following who follows him; given the number.
You could do the same; not only track ‘@markdykeman’ but also ‘markdykeman’, ‘dykeman’, ‘broadcasting-brain’ etc.
We’re all just waiting for Twitter to allow tracking via IM or a web interface. See you on Twitter! — @craigchilds
@Craig Childs – Yes, good point about tracking on phrases, not just user name. Thanks for stopping by!
hello there. consider me one of your “brand new site visitors”, courtesy of twitter.
@Diane – hello yourself and welcome!