I just got a pleasant prod from a fellow MBA, he is a PR agency guru now, accusing me of 'not getting it' as my tweets are protected.
Quoting: " I have a sneaky suspicion that you're missing the point about Twitter, GW. It's real benefit is not broadcasting to a few, but it's the retweet feature that is enormously powerful. Jeremiah Owyang (a true influencer) wrote a nice piece about it a while back: http://tinyurl.com/5k9kkh"
Everytime I had to explain to people why directly (generally via email) but since embracing Twitter (then blogging, not the other way around). I would like to think I am a tech follower now (prefer to be a leader, seems it is not a longetivy thing unless a handful of guys, given the huge numbers of startup, but that is another story), here are my reasons:
1.) despite I am considered as a 'networker', after you meet with so many thousands of people (yes I have across the world), one tries to limit to a few (for me few hundreds) of contacts and try to 'link-out' mostly but 'link-in' with key guys
like me most CXOs like to meet with a.) people they like/respect, b.) interesting (work, activities, hobbies) c.) inspirational
2.) I did not embrace blogging as I saw it 'too open' and did not understand and would like to open my 'life' to others, so, when Twitter came along, I did sign up in 2007 but thought it was like blogging but worst, namely talking about useless things but in bite size less than a SMS (I did devise a planning tool based on ETSI 0408 GSM) so I did not use it.
3.) based on my conern of above, I finally re-looked at Tweeting, in 2008 because I realised the following potential benefits:
a.) I can protect my feed, so that only people in group 1.) can see my feed
b.) through other people's RT (retweets) [mostly 1.) above, & other interesting guys], I can see a whole new world of blogging/tech/start-up news that I was not really following. (had not a clue who Robert Scoble was until I started following.. and yes I thought it was a bit weird when there was a campaign for re-instating him on Facebook. probably like me, most people (described below) would not have investigated (I didn't for one)
Regarding blogging/tweeting, I would like to argue 60-70% of B2B business world has no clue about and maybe even 80% of general populations have not a clue (someone has stats?/ but most of the stats I see are skewed towards the Tech industry, as it is funded by them! so, hopefully some government can do some census on this maybe?/) but there might be a much higher population that are aware of Tweeting in the last 6months due to the brilliant strategy/adoptions by the media and the celebrities worldwide.
As I see it, benefits and challenges of protecting tweets:
a.) even with protected feed, I now have some good friends (some big tweeter influencers) that would retweet me (which generally is not 'my content' as I rarely have time to write original blog post, this is one of few I wrote)
b.) spam level, I have NOT seen any, until last week of all these time I have been using it (since 07 but in earnest since mid 08?), one use @GarethWong with a link which sadly I stupidly clicked on, and another one I forgot, I got so p**sed off that I deleted and report it via tweetdeck rightaway (@IainDodsworth, @Tweetdeck, how come you don't support Chinese anymore!?)
c.) yes, -ve is that most conversations you can't join in, and even if you do, people don't see you as important, and generally don't response.. but I can follow up with email anyway..
to protect from sanity, privacy, and potential spam, I stick to my gun and will keep on protecting my feed.
however, I started tweeting non private stuff, via @cxoeurope, @cxoasia, but that was about the time when I started having the spam..
oh well, we cannot have the world...
happy Tweeting.
Hopefully this answers all your questions about why I protect my tweets.
now how do I set the blogger to provide a permanent link!? anyone pls help, I cannot figure that one out yet!
@GarethWong
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