I received an email the other day to my personal account from someone that’s been following me on twitter for some time now. This person asked me why I haven’t chosen to follow them back. It’s a fair question I suppose. Especially, given that twitter lately seems to be about who can amass the largest number of followers.

People have even started adopting tools and techniques to let them auto follow you back after you’ve followed them. Geez, I’m flattered Seriously, think about it. This person has no idea who I am, what I do, or why I even followed them. Yet, they decided it was really important to instantly follow me back. Huh?

I guess everyone is taking the advice Guy Kawasaki gave to me here and simply believing that there’s no such thing as too many followers. He never responded to my tongue in cheek response about Nazi Germany, but I imagine it’s hard to sift through all the responses he gets.

I’m not a collector of followers. Does my twitter Grader score of 99.5 mean anything when you consider that DarthVader’s is 99.94? Seriously, these things really don’t matter to me, and yet somehow they have become semi-important pieces of evaluative data. I don’t follow you back because you’ve elected to follow me. Sorry, just like the Punch Buggy game, there are no punch backs

OK – you’ve listened to me whine about the problem long enough. I appreciate that. Before we get to the good stuff, let me be upfront in telling you that my approach changes frequently. I found the need to keep updating as twitter continued to grow. So who do I follow? At a high level the people I follow fall into the following categories:

Companies: I don’t follow every company. I tend to follow the ones that are the most active or most innovative. Seeing how these companies are using this still very young platform helps me understand what’s possible. On a lot of levels they are a great set of petri dishes. I can observer, learn, and apply the knowledge.

Link Sharers: These people are like my personal RSS feed. They bring the best of the web to twitter. This reduces the amount of time and effort I need to expend on learning and staying current. Part of my job is to be on top the latest, greatest, best, worst, newest, and most innovative. These people help me do that. One thing to keep in mind is that news outlets like AdAge would also fall into this category.

Friends: Pretty simple. These are people who I have a professional or personal relationship with. Often this is a pre-existing relationship.

Engagers: The great thing about twitter is that anyone can engage anyone (unless of course you block your updates). A large majority of the people I follow are these folks. Over time, after enough quality interactions, I convert and start following.

Random Curiosity: This group is primarily made up of celebrities, actors, musicians, politicians, etc. Many rarely tweet. Many have a handler doing the tweeting for them. But, I find these people very interesting. I think it’s the hope or anticipation of a cool, funny, unique, or interesting tweet. The nice think about following these people is that they don’t clutter your follower stream because of how infrequently they engage.

That’s it. I don’t think it’s anything groundbreaking or breakthrough. In fact, it’s damn simple. If you aren’t doing one of the above I won’t be following you.  Now that you know what it takes, will you do any of it?

As an added bonus, here’s a list of people I think are worth following. Enjoy.

On of my favorite resources on the web, Hub Spot, launched a a crazy video early this morning that channels Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” I first learned about the vide from Mike Volpe, The VP Inbound Marketing at Hub Spot, on twitter.  The team at Hub Spot does an amazing parody of the song. Parody, might be a loose term. This is on a Wierd Al level. The focus of the video is Inbound Marketing.  Yes you can make the concept of Inbound Marketing into a video parody.

You know what?  Enough with my typing.  Just watch the video and make sure your speakers are on and the volume turned up.

Hubspot, the maker of Web Site Grader, has introduced a new product caller Twitter Grader.  Twitter Grader seeks to quantify a person’s Twitter profile.  Specifically, Twitter Grader, indicates they use the following information to arrive at a score:

• The number of followers you have
• The power of this network of followers
• The pace of your updates
• The completeness of your profile
• …a few others 

I think this is a GREAT first step in figuring out how to indicate a person’s value to the Twitter community.  Admittedly, Twitter Grader is limited by the information that is readily available.  Essentially, that can’t leverage an input for their algorithm that does NOT exist.

The one thing missing from Twitter Grader’s methodology is content quality.  Unfortunately, there really isn’t a simple metric they can pull from because Twitter doesn’t offer one.  I’ve asked Twitter to add in functionality that allows people to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” a Tweet based on the value the reader believes they are/are not getting.  I think this feature is a critical add on for a variety of reasons.

1. It’ll keep people honest.  Tweeters will actually have to consider what type of content they publish.
2. It takes volume of Tweets out of the equation or at a minimum reduces its value.  The current Twitter Grader model looks at frequency of posts.  Well hell, that’s not a real determining factor of value.  If I had no life I could just tweet non stop for 24 hours and overtake the current Tweet leader.
3. You’ll generate more Twitter members.  The singe biggest gripe I hear about regarding Twitter is the signal to noise ratio.  Many people complain to me that Twitter is filled with a lot of garbage and it’s too challenging to find the diamonds in the rough.  I couldn’t agree more.  Even if you follow, so-called industry leaders, you end up with a lot of shameless self-promotion.

Ok, that’s a gross over-statement, but they don’t matter as much as they used to.  This great article at HubSpot says much of what I’ve been professing for the past 8 months, but it explains it a hell of a lot better than I do.  At a high level, here is why open rates don’t really matter:

1. The open isn’t usually the desired action.  The action is embedded in the email itself.  You/we want the recipient to click and ultimately do the desired response
2. The conservative nature of email programs, like Outlook, are blocking our images and thus not reporting email opens accurately.
3. Mobile and handheld devices like the Blackberry are great for instantaneous delivery and action.  However, an open on a Blackberry is not reported as an open.
4. Most reported open rates don’t take into account bounces.  If you send out 10,000 emails and 1,000 end up as hard bounces, you have a net delivery of 9,000.  We should key off of 9,000 and not the 10,000.
5. Spam filters have gotten so aggressive that many emails end up being seen as junk mail even though they aren’t.  Most of those recipients will never open that email.