As you know, my Twitter account got hijacked about a week ago. I’m not @guykawasaki, so they still haven’t fixed it. In fact, so far, all I’ve gotten from Twitter are auto-responders. Ironic, as Twitter, of ALL organizations, should understand the viral nature of unhappiness and the visibility of everything as a natural feature of online communities.

This blog is a mix of two things. First, a little about what happened and the various things I’m doing to recover. Second, one of the most important tools I was using before I got hacked was Topify. Now? It’s a must-have for me as I try to reconnect with people I lost from the hacking.

The hacker changed my username, uploaded a new picture and changed my email address to whatever evil email address he’s using.

I’m grateful the hacker changed my username, because guess what THAT did!? It freed my original username back up! When Twitter wasn’t responding to me, I just re-signed up for @cjromb. I lost all my stream of updates showing on Twitter, I lost all my DM’s (to and from me), and I lost all my followers. Sort of.

Nothing I can do about the DMs.

Nothing I can really do to make the stream of updates show back up either.

BUT, I got the favorites back. The way I did it was to login to my @cjromb account, and then go over to my old page, under the new username. I clicked on the favorites there, and marked them all as favorites again. Now they show up under @cjromb again.

And, I got most of my updates back, although I can’t make them show up in my update stream. I did this by having Sam, my office manager, expand the “more” button at the bottom over and over until she couldn’t anymore. Then she copied all that and pasted it in a spreadsheet. Not that I’ve said anything monumental, but it’s the point more than anything.

I got a list of people I follow and people who follow me by going to http://friendorfollow.com and exporting a csv file of the three categories there - people who follow that I don’t follow, people I follow who don’t follow me, and friends (people I follow who follow back.)

Then I started following people again. Alas, ironically, I bumped into Twitter’s follow limits! Amazing, right? Trying to recover from a hacking makes me look like a hacker.

Some really kind people got on Twitter and talked about what happened and encouraged people to refollow me if they were originally following me, along with telling them to BLOCK @cjmiles69 (the username someone changed my account to originally). That got me some new followers, too.

Last, but not least, I’m using Topify, and this part is really important. I USED to just roll my mouse over someone’s bio who was following me and then if it was someone I wanted to follow I would. Then I’d go back later and read their tweets to get to know them a little bit, correspond with them, etc.

Then, awhile back, I signed up with Topify. They send me an email everytime someone follows me. It tells me who followed, when they signed up on Twitter (sadly my sign-up date is now reset, too!), how many updates they’ve done, and a sample of their recent updates. They tell me if I’m already following that person, too, critical to me right now for figuring out who’s a new follower, vs. people who are following me back from me trying to reconnect with them again.

All in all, Topify gives you a much clearer picture of who just followed.

Right after the hacking happened, when I first re-signed up for my username, I hadn’t reconnected my new account with Topify. I just started following people again, assuming that everyone who was a new follower was just following back in response to me following them (do you follow here?) Then I realized that wasn’t the case, some of these people aren’t people I was previously following.

And then something else big clicked….the hacker didn’t change my bio when he changed my username over. If he used that account to follow people, and someone saw my bio, they’d follow it, because my old account didn’t LOOK like it was spam, even after the hacker had TURNED it into spam!

Topify fixes this because their email has so much information. So rather than continue to just roll my mouse over and follow, I contacted Topify, and told them what happened. They sent me my Topify email so I could reconnect my new account with them, and voila, I’m getting all that cool information in my email so I can decide who to follow back.

Oh, yeah, and the only thing you have to do to follow the person back when you get the Topify email? Hit Reply and Send on your email. How cool is that?

And, one last thing about Topify. Their customer service is WAAAAYYY better than Twitter’s. (Actually, ANY customer service is better than Twitter’s has been. To date, I have 10 auto-responders from them, and that’s about it. They all say the same thing…send in a pile of information I’ve already sent to them at least three times.) Topify responds, is personable, and helps. That’s how it SHOULD be.

If you’re on Twitter, and you’re not using Topify? You should be. I think it’s a critical information tool for helping you follow, respond or block new followers. This is especially helpful to me right now, while I’m trying to recover from this hacking.

More about the hacking later, but for now, I wanted to give you a few ideas for recovering from hacking if it happens to you, and tell you how great I think Topify is every day, and especially in situations like this.

As my friend Steve Harper said, the Twitter posts to my account give a whole new meaning to my nickname “Gadget Girl”.

Until 2 am this morning, I was @cjromb. At midnight, I was having a great time just tweeting away with a few friends. I got up this morning to an email from @moxiemarketing and another from Patti DeNucci (an EXCELLENT business to business matchmaker) telling me about it.

They changed my username to @cjmiles69, they put up a picture of some girl (hotter than me, that’s at least nice), and they posted a bunch of sex toy posts. BTW, don’t go LOOK at it, because it just gives them traffic. Plus, I don’t want you seeing someone hotter than me misrepresenting me.

It’s quite an ordeal to prove that you’re you, and I’m guessing if they had a rash of those last night, it’s going to be awhile before they get my account straightened out. I hope it’s quick!

In the meantime, here’s what I’ve done:

I’ve already downloaded all the people I’m following and all the people who are following me to .csv files. I did this by going to http://friendorfollow.com, clicking on each category, and using their download function.

My office manager has already downloaded all my posts, or will have by time I post this (in case the hacker’s watching my website, which is listed on my bio.)

We have an encrypted password manager, and we have different passwords on every single account we own everywhere. They’re all hard to guess. All of them, that is, except my Twitter account. I will admit, because I access it so much, it’s the only one I changed to something simple.

My bad, 100%.

Dear Twitter, I am guilty of making it easy for someone to hack my account. Please forgive me, give my account back, and I promise it will never happen again. I learn from my mistakes, and then I teach others. Maybe that’s what makes me a good teacher. I’ve made all the mistakes.

So here’s me being a lesson for you. If your account password is easy to guess, go change that right now, or you could be the next Gadget Girl, offering toys you’ve never even heard of, for sale on your Twitter account.

NOTE: I didn’t post this right away because I wanted to get my posts off Twitter before I did. I’ve got them now, and in the very long days that have passed since I got hacked, there’s a lot more to the story. I’ll write more about it later, plus I’ll write more about creating passwords that won’t get stolen, storing them safely, and avoiding third-party apps that can be phished from.

In the meantime, I truly appreciate EVERYONE who has emailed, Facebooked, called, SparkPeople’d, and texted me to tell me that my account got jacked.

And a REALLY special thank you goes out to Connie Reece, who writes Every Dot Connects. She wrote a blog about this situation, not just my account, but the ability of spammers to hi-jack accounts in general. Here’s a link to it. I hope you’ll read it, and if you’re on social media, I hope you’ll give this issue some thought. I’ll write more about why I think it needs your attention later.

For now, here’s Connie’s post:
Reclaiming Twitter

I’ve consolidated my email, and I’m reading it all on Gmail.  I’ve also got my Blackberry popping my Gmail, which means all of my email goes through Gmail, and then to my Blackberry.  Gmail does an EXCELLENT job of filtering out spam.  One place to read all my email addresses when I’m online, one place to read all my email mesages when I’ve only got my phone, and no spam.  What more could I want?

You know there’s more, right?

We’re using Basecamp for detailed project management.  It’s doing a great job.  Thing is, only 5 projects show up on the main page, and I’m involved in way more than five projects.  Plus, I have to login to see when something gets completed.  It doesn’t notify the person who enters the to-do.  Additionally, I don’t get any other notifications unless someone directly checks my name to be notified.

But I want to know what’s going on!  I want to be in touch.  I want my co-workers to be able to check something off without having to also TELL me they checked something off.

Good news.  Basecamp has an RSS feed feature.  Each time someone checks off a to-do, uploads a file, leaves a message or does any other major task, the RSS feed is updated.

A little bit on RSS:  A VERY little bit!  You can subscribe to RSS feeds so you get notified. Usually you connect the RSS feed you’re interested in reading to a news reader that can read them.  It’s the same concept as connecting an email address you want to read to an email reader like Outlook, or Gmail.  Subscribing to an RSS feed is a bit like subscribing to an email group.  Someone publishes new information, and everyone who’s said “I’m interested!” gets notified without the blog publisher doing anything but publishing the blog.

Back to Basecamp and the task at hand.  Basecamp has this RSS feed available on a per project or global basis inside your Basecamp account.  You can “subscribe” to either project notification or global notification.

So, like I said, I want to know what’s going on.  I got Basecamp’s RSS global feed link for my account, and now what?  Normally I would paste that into reader software which can handle protected RSS feeds (because Basecamp requires login).  But then I have to go to that reader to see the information.  Why can’t I go to my email and see emails PLUS anything that’s going on in Basecamp, whether someone’s directly notified me or not?

Turns out I can.  There’s probably many ways to accomplish this.  If you know of one, please share.  Here’s how I did it.

I signed up for NewsGator’s online service.  Free, great reputation, handles protected RSS feeds.  Not all RSS feed readers do.

I got Colin, who handles our server management to set me up a new email account.  Don’t have a server? You can set up another account on Gmail or some other service.  Let’s say my new email for RSS feeds is cjnews at wildwoodinteractive period com.

After getting that set up on the server, I logged into Gmail.  I clicked on Settings and went to the Accounts tab.   Under Get mail from other accounts, I chose Add a mail account you own.

Your new email address goes in the first window.

When you click continue, here’s a screenshot of that window, along with what goes in the box.

Here’s a screenshot of what I put in the box.

Your new email address goes in the first window

Entered that new email address, along with NewsGators information from this page (you have to be signed up and logged in for this link to work)

NewsGator Email Edition

I had to put in the pop server information, along with my NewsGator username and password.

Voila, Gmail started popping anything that’s in the feed reader, including?  That’s right!  The Basecamp notifications!  I’m just giddy with delight that I can read EVERYTHING in one place that has to do with running Wildwood.  How cool is that?

And, while I’m at it? I also imported all my other blog subscriptions into NewsGator so Gmail will send me notifications on them, too.

By the way, in case that’s not cool enough?  I can subscribe to people’s Twitter feeds, too, and have them show up in my email, too.

I’d love to hear any creative ways you’ve used RSS feed readers or email to make communication more effective and information more available.

Also, if you want more information on what an RSS feed reader is, or how it can help you, let me know, and I’ll send some your way.

And now that I’m done with this blog post?  I’m going to check my Gmail to see if the RSS subscription I have to it shows up as a message.

I’m writing this blog post using new piece of software I just purchased last week called Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Maura Thomas, who owns Regain Your Time, spent some time this morning training me on the software with real-life hands-on examples.

I’m in the middle of several automation projects with an eye towards increasing productivity and gaining efficiencies in both our administrative processes and our core business of developing websites and website applications.

Dragon NaturallySpeaking takes a little bit to memorize your inflections and learn your jargon, but once you have it trained, I bet you could very quickly dictate a lot of what you normally write.

It has advanced features such as executing commands on software like Word and Outlook. They claim to be compatible with a large number of software packages.

Right now I’m giddy with the discovery of this new software, and my brain is on fire with potential ideas for combining this with other productivity ideas and projects I’m currently working on.

I have an idea for how it might interact with another piece of productivity software I’m already using.  If I can get that to work, this will be a significant increase in productivity for the small time investment it will take to learn the two software packages well, and combine them together.

If you’re interested in learning more about Dragon NaturallySpeaking here’s their website: http://budurl.com/nuance
If you’re interested in quickly learning the software to begin enjoying the benefits of increased productivity you should seriously consider hiring Regain Your Time to help you.

I’ve known Maura, who’s a productivity consultant, for awhile.  I’ve heard from several other business owners who have worked with her.  They swear she’s changed their lives for the better.

Despite my fairly extroverted nature, I’m used to being quiet while I’m in alone in my office and not on the phone.  I enjoy the silence.  It’s going to take a little time to get used to hearing myself talk in here. Hopefully no one else in my office will think I’m talking to myself, either.

(By the way I wrote and edited this blog using Dragon NaturallySpeaking.)

I think it’s been about a week now, and I’ve fallen completely and deeply in love with the first Mac I’ve ever owned.  I got it as an open item about a week ago.  Now, all I want to do is touch it, caress it, type on it.  Every time I take it out, I discover something new and pleasant.

Today, I’ve learned how to touch it just right to get it to do things for me.  Subtle, yet very intuitive.  I can’t even describe how to do one of them, but I’ll try.  Take all five fingers and scoop them together when you have multiple windows open.  It makes all the windows show up on the desktop in a reduced size, so you can see what you have open, and go to another window if you want.  Spread them back out, and you go back to the way things were.

Four fingers on the touchpad, in an up and down direction, roll your current window up or down like a window shade.

Two fingers up and down on the touchpad scroll up and down a page or up and down inside a scrollable area like this text area.  Two fingers back and forth flip back and forth between browser windows.

I’m sure there’s a guide somewhere that will explain all the ways the Mac can be touched, but that would feel just a little like cheating to me.  I’m enjoying the tantalizing little discoveries, like the way you discover tiny things about the person you’re newly in love with, by just experiencing them.

I’ve also learned a bunch of new shortcuts on Firefox today.  Funny, that link to the shortcuts has been there all along, but I never “saw” it until today.  I’m seeing new things through my Mac’s eyes, too, the way you feel like you’ve got new eyes for the world when you’ve just fallen in love.  I’ll write another blog about the Firefox shortcuts later.  Today, I’m too enamoured with the Mac to think of distracting myself with telling you about that.

In fact, I’ve been thinking a lot about how getting to know this new Mac has been very similar to starting a new relationship.  Sure, I love gadgets in general, but this has been different.  This isn’t a date, or a new friendship.  This has quickly turned into a primary interest, like the way I’m crazy about Twitter or Sparkpeople…and my exchange students, my husband and doggies.

There are a few differences between a new love relationship with a person and the one I’m involved in with my Mac.

First, even though I don’t always realize what I’m telling it to do, it IS only doing what I tell it to do. 

Another another difference?  My Mac makes this pleasant little froggie noise when I do something wrong.  Significantly more pleasant than I suspect any of us have experienced when we’ve had our first tiff in a new relationship, eh?

I’d love to hear what your favorite touchpad shortcuts are on your Mac.  Don’t tell them ALL to me, though, cuz I want to discover some on my own.

I did it.  I bought a MacBook Pro.  It was an open item, so I get two weeks to decide if I like it or not.

I’ve never owned a Mac before.  I’ve never even really touched one before.

It was twice what we paid for a Toshiba E105 about a week ago.

I’m trying to dislike it, really I am.  If I disliked it, I could take it back and get two more Toshiba’s for what I just paid for this Mac which has less storage space, less RAM, no PC programs, and does things I don’t yet understand.

But I have an open-mind about gadgets.  I don’t say I don’t like something until I’ve given it a fair try, unless it falls apart immediately.

So I’ve spent the past two days with it.  Just touching it, (or petting it, as I suppose it looks like I”m doing) is a pleasure in itself.

And the ONLY thing I don’t like about the new Toshiba is the stiff mouse click on the touchpad…absent on the Mac.  Smooth as silk, all one pad.

I’m getting used to the different selection keys.  They’re not the same on a Mac as they are on a PC.  But the Parcheesi/C (I don’t remember what that swirlee key is called, so I’ve been calling it Parcheesi…anyway), that key combination for copying is easier to reach than the Ctl-C on a PC.

Plus, once I figured out that moving your fingers in opposite directions on the touchpad is what was causing the fonts to get bigger and smaller on the screen?  Once I solved that mystery? That’s a cool feature for zooming in an out!

The program, Spaces, is useful, once I figured out where my open windows went.

I never realized how much I use the keys to hop between words, selecting, copying, cutting and pasting as I went.  Those keys are different on a PC than on a Mac, so I’m still acclimating.

But did I mention how soft it is to touch, how sleek, how silky, how smooth?

West tripped over the power cord.  You Mac users know what happened.  The magnetic cord came easily out of the box without causing any problem at all.

There’s no eject button for the CD.  That’s bothering me a little.  Sure, I figured out how to eject it with software, but what if I don’t want the boot up to include whatever’s on that disk?

I installed a few things like Firefox.  iTunes doesn’t read in and convert .WMA files on the Mac like it does on my PC, so I had to go back and do that there and return.  But it was so CLUNKY typing on my old PC laptop to get that done.  I was happy to go back to the Mac, happy to ignore this missing feature.

As I said, I’ve only had the Mac for two days now.  And West is right, we do need to figure out if the utility is justified considering the expense.

And the computer guy said “Are you sure you don’t want the service plan? It IS a Mac.” which has us both wondering about the stability of them.

Someone told me you can partition the hard drive to have Windows on it so I could run Windows apps, too.

Can’t think of any other tidbits to share about my first two days with my Mac…except I brought it to work today, even though I clearly have other machines.  I just wanted it nearby.  And I named it.  That’s usually big trouble for me once I name something.

I named it Molly, because By Golly, Miss Molly, I think I’m fallin’ in love!

HUGE props to the organizers of SXSW this year for all the excellent panels!  It was just about physically painful choosing which panels to attend.  I wanted to attend multiple panels in nearly every time slot.  I ached with regret over what I missed, but I’m not sorry about which ones I attended.  I was so full at the end of the day, I didn’t attend evening events either.

I went to approximately 22 panels, not counting ones I went to for less than 5 minutes due to oversaturation or lack of interest on my part.

A few days later, and I’m still recovering. I’ve nicknamed the way my brain feels “Post Interactive Saturation Disorder (PISD).”

I’ve got audio recordings, images, video and over 70 pages of notes I can’t wait to pour over, absorb and implement.

The list of my top 15 below is NOT in order of how well I liked the presenter or the presentation!  In fact, there’s several panels I truly enjoyed that aren’t on this list at all.

Instead, this list is the panels prioritized based on three criteria: Applicable, Impactful, Altered.

APPLICABLE
How applicable is this to us and our business right now?

IMPACTFUL
How much impact would implementing this information have on us?

ALTERED
Is this a new way of thinking, new trends, or new information that I haven’t considered or didn’t know before, but now consider important to act on?

Here’s how my list came out:

1. Presenting Straight to the Brain
2. Tips For Making Ideas Happen
3. Change Your World in 50 Minutes Making Breakthroughs Happen
4. Oooh, That’s Clever! (Unnatural Experiments in Web Design)
5. Emerging Trends of Mobile Technology
6. Everything You Know About Web Design Is Wrong
7. Building Strong Online Communities
8. Video Blogging Turning Wine into Gold
9. Guy Kawasaki and Chris Anderson
10. Tony Hseih
11. Making Whuffie Raising Social Capital in Online Communities
12. HOWTO 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!
13. VC Secrets Plan B for Fundraising
14. Start-up Management OMG I Have to Manage People
15. Developing Super Senses Tools to Know Your Users

This weekend, I’ll start going through the information I gathered, in the order of this list.  I’ll write blogs to share what I learned, so if you don’t want to miss any, subscribe to this blog via email or RSS.

Did you go to SXSW Interactive?  Which panels made a difference to you?

Did you miss it this year?  Which ones on my list are you most interested in hearing about?

I tried to comment on a blog today. Fail. The go button just spun around and around. Good thing I’d copied my comment before I pushed the go button. So, I’ll just blog here about what I had to say, plus some.

The blog post I was commenting on was called “5 People Who Broke the Rules of Social Media and Succeeded”. It was written by David Sparks.

Here’s a link to David’s blog if you want to read it.

He makes these 5 points and then gives examples:

START OF DAVID’S LIST

1. Rule #1 broken: Do whatever you have to do to keep your job
2. Rule #2 broken: You can’t make money on YouTube
3. Rule #3 broken: Top Twitterers have the best advice on how to use Twitter
4. Rule #4 broken: Always follow Seth Godin’s advice
5. Rule #5 broken: Don’t get sloppy and unprofessional when pitching bloggers

END OF DAVID’S LIST AND BACK TO MY COMMENTS

I think the best thing to remember about the rules is old advice you’ve heard before: “Rules are made to be broken.”

LEARNING THE RULES
Even though we’ve all heard the phrase “Social Media” a bazillion times by now, there’s many people still trying to figure out how they “fit” in the new picture.

I think researching, observing, participating, and learning from others about this new form of connecting and communicating is essential. You want to know “the rules”…or as I call them, the “standards.” (I actually define “rules” as the technical limits, and “standards” as the community norms.)

THEN, MAKE YOUR OWN
Then, be yourself. Set your own standards. Determine how this works for you. What’s your unique flavor?

IT’S YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD
I’ve been using a neighborhood analogy in my “LOL - Living OnLine(TM)” speech/presentation. It seems to help people wrap their heads around how to interact in this sometimes scary new space by mapping it to real world neighborhood examples.

You’re building your own house in this neighborhood, deciding how to behave in it, who to interact with, and how to interact with them.

IT’S YOUR GARDEN, TOO
It’s spring, so the neighborhood analogy is making me think of gardens and growing things. What I love about communities like Twitter and others is that we are each allowed to grow our own garden and decorate our own houses our own way. Of COURSE our neighbors want to give input into that, but it’s our decision to make.

To David’s point of breaking the rules, you can just take your neighbor’s word for how to grow your garden. Sure ask his advice, look around to see what else is growing. But here’s examples of people who decided to build their own gardens their own ways, and gosh darn, they were able to harvest something valuable!

So after you ask advice and look around? YOU should choose what to plant and how to cultivate it.

After all, what they plant may not work if you plant it.

Or you may not like the way whatever they plant looks or tastes.

OTHERS MAY NEED AND WANT WHAT YOU GROW
And maybe others are yearning for what YOU plant, not what everyone ELSE has planted.

DO YOU WANT TO CREATE COMMODITY? OR COMMUNITY!
Plus? If EVERYONE plants the same thing, now you’ve got a commodity. There’s no way to stand out. Sure, someone has to grow the commodities and there will always be people who are okay with that.

That’s not me, though, and it’s most likely not you. You CAN succeed without following the perceived “rules”.

Innovation, uniqueness, experimentation; grow your own garden your own way.

I had the most amazing opportunity to talk to women business owners at a NAWBO meeting about why I believe they MUST pay attention to and interact on social media, especially Twitter.

Of course AFTERWARDS, I got on Twitter (no surprise there), but then? I noticed immediately they’ve rearranged the furniture a bit. There’s a new shiny, blinky search box in the upper right hand corner, and there’s a trends choice added to the menu. Plus, a few other things have been scooted around.

They hooked up search.twitter.com to the main page, and made it easy to access by putting the search box right on the page. They’re going to get a lot more search traffic from this.

Dare I give it a try? Ah, you know I can’t resist pushing the buttons! So I try. And guess WHAT? It works. Sweet.

The trends from search.twitter.com are there now, too, so I don’t have to go to search.twitter.com anymore for those either. Trends tell you what’s hot, or “trending”. I bet the trending feature gets alot more attention now, and gets discovered more quickly by newbies.

They moved the link to my profile and settings underneath my Twitter name. Nice use of real estate, appropriate place for that to be anyway.

They dolled up the search page, too. Nice big search box, featured user (don’t remember that being there before.) And how cool is that? My buddy @RicciNeer put in a #followfriday tweet for me. #followfriday is a hashtag people use to tell others who to follow and why.

And then I noticed that they also improved the usability of the Followers screen. Used to have to click on the person to do the device updates, didn’t you? Or am I just now seeing things that have always been there?

Last week Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, declared Twitter to be “poor man’s email”, while Jon Stewart roasted tweeters, calling them Twatting Twatters or something like that. (I think Jon should interview Eric…Oooo, I’d pay!)

Anyway, they’re both, in my opinion, clear examples of two guys who aren’t gettin’ it. But I’m doing my part to infect as many people as I can with Twitter Insanity. After all, where else can you go, and on one single screen see so many people who have taken the time to share. A blog, a giggle, a video, a picture, some news, great tips, a little foolishness, a business idea, a quote, some community conversation. It’s brilliant, it’s always on when I want it, and it’s changed my life in some unbelievably wonderful ways.

You GO Twitter! I hope you get lots of money soon to buy (create) some new toys. For now, I like the new search showing on my Tweet Stream page.

LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc., etc. This phenomenon, this new world of COMMUNICATION is referred to by all kinds of names, including Social Networking, Social Communities, and Social Media (although I think the word “Media” isn’t really a useful work for describing it.)

Important note: It’s ALWAYS prefaced by Social. It’s RARELY suffixed by Marketing, and it’s NEVER suffixed with Monologue. Sure would be cool if everyone in the community remembered this and interacted accordingly.

I’ll talk about Twitter in particular here, because in general, the etiquette/standard has been that you connect on LinkedIn and Facebook with people you’re a bit more familiar with than on Twitter. On Twitter, I now personally, in a 3D kinda way, know less than 1% of the people who are following me and who I’m following. And as my numbers grow, that % can do nothing but go down from there, dictated by the 3D realities of time and travel.

I get that it’s a struggle to remain personal, accessible, interactive, engaged, when you start to get a large number of followers. We realize when you have 5K, 10K, 20K… followers you can’t respond every single time. We all have day jobs, and for 99.9% of us Chief Twitter Officer isn’t our primary job title.

And I realize there’s no rules around replying, responding, auto DM’ing. But there is etiquette, convention, and socially molded standards for acceptable behavior.

The interesting thing about Social Communities is that, over time, the community creates standards, conventions. The members of the community decide what they will put up with, and they school/spank/filter members who don’t comply. It’s an amazing example of self-government. It’s really no different than it is in the 3D world. The schooling, spanking and filtering the community delivers can be brutal or subtle.

The etiquette, although not always agreed upon, not always vocalized, and definitely not written in stone, is very strong because the community, as its grown, has a large number of people clustered around that norm bell curve. Some people are more accepting than others of the outliers with different opinions, and some people change their opinions about their willingness to accept the outliers as they become more and more impacted by those outlier’s choices. Also, as the behavior that doesn’t conform to the normal etiquette standards becomes more and more prolific, the community reacts.

There’s two particular behaviors I’m all about today. The first is that lovely Auto-DM message I have to read when I follow you (often as a response to you following me first!) The second is the lack-o-reponse when someone @replies you or DMs you (non-auto)

@INTERACTING
I follow someone initially or back because they look interesting. I’m doing this manually. I’m following 900+ people, and I didn’t find them by keyword searches or auto-follows on keyword searches or any such thing. I’m here, like many others, to connect and converse.

Twitter is not a marketing tool to me. It’s a networking tool and the most amazing information resource imaginable. Those people I’m following? You’re a business card to me (if you’ll allow the analogy), when I first follow or get followed. But a stack of business cards isn’t useful or fun or worthwhile if you don’t call the people back, get to know them better, right? It’s just paper and (sometimes) a memory of the meeting. Now that I have the business card, I want to get to know you.

No, I can’t spend all my time doing this. No, I don’t expect you to spend all your time doing this either.

But here’s the deal. I’m making a basic assumption. I’m assuming that you’re on Twitter to share, connect, converse, communicate. This is a Social Community, not a Social Monologue. But if I @you after you’ve posted something I’m assuming you posted because you want to share, connect, converse, communicate, and you don’t @reply, I notice. The first or second time, maybe there wasn’t anything for you to say back. Maybe you’re busy, maybe you didn’t see. The third time? Now, I’ve gathered meta-data on you. Meta-data is data you haven’t directly communicated to me, but that I learned in another way about you. This meta-data I just gathered? It can say many things, but usually I assign this meta-data to it: “I don’t really care about you personally, but you’re a # to me, so I’ll keep you.” Frankly? I don’t care if you don’t like me or care about me personally. I’m not a fit for everyone, and everyone isn’t a fit for me. But honestly? I feel used if you keep me on your roles of followers but you won’t interact with me, even when I send you a valuable resource, or RT you several times, or tell you how great something you tweeted is, or comment on your blog that I’ve taken the time to read.

AUTO DM
And here’s the other deal. I get that you’re busy. I get that. But for Pete’s sake, DON’T Auto-DM me after I’ve followed you, whether you followed me first or not. That’s like the Biz Card Shove Dance to me. One person DM’d me “What are you working on right now?” Huh? Are you serious? Another DM’d me “Hey, Pal” as an opener, before we’ve ever had @conversation #1. I’m not your Pal. In fact, I’m a total stranger. You have my business card at best. And with an intro like that? That card is all you’re probably going to get. Someone told me today that they got one that said “And yes, this is an Auto DM.” Are you kidding me? THIS is meta-data on steroids, on warp speed. Thank you for helping ME automatically filter you without wasting anymore time!

I’m not the only one who isn’t liking this. Dave Evans wrote a great blog yesterday about it. It’s worth reading the blog, AND the comments that are starting to build up at the bottom of it. This is a Social Community, and we’re not interested in being treated like Robots, as Dave so aptly points out.

@briancarter created a video this week. I truly appreciated his video. He talked about a big Social Networking mistake he made. What was poignant for me is that I’d @replied to him a few time after he CRACKED me up with a funny video he made (and SHARED on Twitter.) He blew me off. Well, he didn’t blow ME off. I get it. He has lots of followers. But in the video, he shares how he’s realized the deal. He may keep those followers, including me, but he won’t keep the ability to influence, impact, connect or converse with those followers, if he treats them like this. BTW, @briancarter, as I @replied to you (and you RESPONDED to!), I appreciate someone who’s got lots of followers talking about this issue.

@garyvee is a great example of someone who’s got lots of followers, but who truly interacts with as many people as possible. And people are becoming fans! I don’t even drink wine, and I watched his ustream.tv show the other day just cuz I wanted to see him.

@guykawasaki, to me, is another great example of someone who works hard at this. No, he doesn’t respond to every @guykawasaki. He’d never get a thing done! But when it’s relevant, and he has something to say, he’s accessible. I think that’s amazing for someone who has the number of followers he has.

The community backlash is growing. In the past week or two, some of the bigger Twitter applications have been allowing people to block Auto DM’s. I believe TweetDeck’s done something, and SocialToo has done something. I’m pretty sure there’s more apps than this that have taken action, too. There’s even a user trying to help called @optme out that I wrote a blog about.

@designmeme had this to say in one of his updates this morning: “Hello to today’s new followers. I don’t return follow anymore until you @ me with something to say. :)”

I think that’s a fair request, a fair standard. If you’re a person (I do make an exception and exclude news services from this), and you’re not going to connect, converse, respond, interact in any way with me, I don’t need or want to be on your follower list.

I changed my Twitter bio last night to say this at the end: “I want to converse. If I @you & you NEVER reply? Hm”

Who else doesn’t like this trend? I’m seeing a lot of tweets come through on my personal tweet stream, and blogs on my RSS feed reader about this. If I’m seeing this much in my limited view of the larger universe, my guess is it’s an issue that should continue to be talked about and addressed as we find our way through this amazing new way to learn, communicate and connect beyond our wildest dreams from just a decade ago.

Here’s a HILARIOUS video clip of Jon Stewart talking about Twitter the other night. In there, he says “Twatters”. I have an idea. Maybe that’s a good nickname for the people who haven’t figured out that the meta-data they’re giving out and the way they’re interacting (or NOT interacting) can cause a great big painful fall, and additionally, truly devalues the very community in which they’re a member.

I appreciate you reading my blog about this topic. Apparently, I had quite a bit to say about it. I’d love to hear your experience, and your opinion, even if it’s different than mine.