Occam’s RazR

I don’t talk much social media anymore, and certainly not here, but I need a place to offer up a simple suggestion about how to use tools to help others cut down on information overload.

I never mentioned this, but it came to mind during a brief discussion with Chris Brogan and Mack Collier about when to “unfollow” people on Twitter. I typically don’t worry about who decides to follow or unfollow me, and I don’t bother with any of the services designed tokeep everything artificially reciprocal. I can understand why Chris does, though, because he follows more than 80,000 people, and is followed in similar numbers.

I was convinced that I didn’t want to follow more than 500 people, but for personal reasons started expanding my local network, essentially following most Birmingham-area people I came across. But I know of several who, over the course of months, have dropped me. “Nothing personal, you’re just noisy.” And I certainly can be that.

On my Twitter policy page (which anyone who clicks over from my profile will see) I outline my behavior and my expectations. I’ve tried to make clear how I feel about forced reciprocity, and my desire to engage does about every conversation that comes my way. Several people have freely cribbed my guidelines, modified them, and clearly set their own expectations for visitors. (By the way, this is also a great Best Practice for corporations and organizations…)

Recently, I added a way for the noise-averse to still know what I was up to, without being “in their stream.” It’s a link to the Twitter search page for ‘ikepigott’, so it includes all the people who reference me. Instead of being a direct link to the page, I’ve taken the RSS feed for those results, and put them through Feedburner for two reasons:

1. I get a better sense of how many people would rather me not be in their Twitter streams, and
2. I have the flexibility to alter that feed in the future by changing the inputs. For instance, I might change my mind and want just my Tweets instead of mentions, or if I want to include misspellings of my name.

It’s just offering people a different way to engage, and not feel left out of the party (or sheepish about unsubscribing.) For those hung up on numbers, the Feedburner stats aren’t reliable on any given day, but over time you’ll get a better sense of your reach and the measurement you crave.