Being Mark Cohen

@renailemay interviewed @stephenconroy and most poignantly pointed out the calamity of Fake Stephen Conroy being out of beer.  Oh, and out of a job too.  Funny how the fake Stephen Conroy, even when full of beer, makes so much more sense than the allegedly real one

Here’s the video:

 

Seems to me that the general lifecycle of a social media site goes “niche site -> organic growth -> critical mass -> boom growth -> marketers arrive -> metamorphosis -> maturity or fragmentation”

Twitter seems to be  arriving at the “metamorphosis” point.  Our favourite child of a social media site is growing up.  Every day I get a few followers who are marketers or some other form of people with something to sell.  I will admit to having been sucked into the “it’s not polite to NOT follow back” idea, and so my twitterstream is now quite polluted with a lot of crap.  But I’m unsubscribing a heap of them now.

My basic rules of thumb which I use to determine whether I’ll follow someone back are:

• The person is a person or a spectacularly interesting feed
• The person converses with their followers
• The person has at least half as many followers as they follow
• The person on average posts less than five things in an hour