Ezra’s posterous

I have been taking the quite vocal outlook that Qwitter is evil, the devil incarnate, and Satan all rolled into one. I have blamed Qwitter for things from wrinkles to the US attacks yesterday in Syria. But my outlook cannot be explained in 140 characters.

Twitter is a relationship oriented universe.

We can employ positive and negative metrics to measure relationships. We could see how often people interact, or how often they retweet others. If we would sit behind a person as he/she is on twitter we can see what links they click on, and what they read.

Relationships are a lot more complex than that. For instance, I have a relationship with the music group "Staind". They produce music that expresses their emotions, I buy their albums, listen to them, and through empathy, strengthen my connection with them. They have never met me, heard of me, and probably never will.
We have, what I would refer to as, a "one to many relationship", they produce one piece of communication (i.e. the single "Believe"), and though it connect with thousands of people, if not tens of thousands.

We are also able to describe Staind as a brand. As a brand, it is important to know how many people are fans, adherents, casual users, or, yes, even haters. One public relations slipup, one offensive lyric, and they can lose a large client base, which can result in loss of money. They have to be able to keep their finger on the proverbial pulse.

In Twitter, there are many users who have "one to many relationships" as well. Many are veritable, or glorified, (sometimes) interactive RSS feeds. For them, numbers is everything. When they brag to their friends at night, they say, "I have 15404 followers". As was pointed out in a recent mashable article, many of those people have extremely high ratings in twitter grader or twinfluence.

From a branding standpoint, many of those people are straddling the line between a "Brand" and a "Personal Brand". [Explanation: We are all walking, talking, tweeting personal brands, but our monetization methods are not necessarily like @GaryVee or @1938Media. They straddle the line. And yes, I chose the two people who have openly said that they don't care about numbers.] Those people need to know. They are not interacting with every individual who receives their stream, but they hope that they are providing something of value to their community.

Just like notifications for new followers, Qwitter can provide them with important information. If they so desire, they can ascertain why certain people choose to follow them, and then subsequently unfollow. It can give them the whole picture. An extremely wholesale picture which treats every follower as a number, and nothing more.

But people who are aiming for one to one relationships, and hope that every single 'one to many communique' will spur some sort of conversation, have very little use for this metric. These people are wholly "personal brands". I will take myself as an example. I know, usually, why people follow me. Sometimes it's because of a bloggery, or because of being mentioned by someone else. Our relationship may start there, but who knows where it could reach.

Not every relationship goes there, and not everyone is interested in me the same way that I am. C'est la vie. I have seen that certain people, influential ones, have unfollowed me. I found out post facto, but I was not shocked. I knew that during that time period, my ratio of helpful tweets to garbage may have been low. In that same time period, I received many new followers, and have formed stronger relationships than I would have with the influential people.

I don't need Qwitter to tell me what to tweet. If I don't notice that you aren't following me, it must mean that I don't have anything to offer you, but you have something to offer me. I can still communicate with you via @ replies, and hope that you will give me another chance at a later point in time.

Personally, if you are going to unfollow because of political or religious beliefs, I would hope that you would have the courtesy to @ the person and be a man/woman about it. But sometimes, its not one tweet, its the general content of all your tweets. Not everyone is as interested in baby supplies as you are. It's not a bad thing, and you will probably be able to build a very strong niche community, but I, as a single guy, has no part of it.

Don't hate people because they don't follow you. Respect people like you would in life. And allow people to avoid uncomfortable confrontations if they so choose to opt out.

Bottom Line: If you are a brand or a brand-like personal brand, use Qwitter for pure metrics. If you are regular personal brand (i.e. regular person), Qwitter will cause wrinkles, and will detract from you being able to forge lasting relationships with people who actually want to have relationships with you. I would go with the relationships.

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