Which would you choose?

I choose both, damn its hot today!

Chris Brogans book, co-authored by Julien Smyth, is available for order on line or locally, just ask at your bookshop.  Its called Trust Agents and for information about where you can buy it you can get details here. Mines been ordered today and just be be absolutely clear, no you cant borrow it, go buy your own!

In case you missed it, here’s the link again (its not an affiliate link its a list of places to help you find the book):

Buy Trust Agents from any of these suppliers.

Why Unfollow everyone on Twitter?

The reoccurring theme for Chris Brogan and Darren Rowse here is something akin to spam, although to wholly class it as spam is a bit of a sweeping statement. Its more of a user error I believe, or basically a lack of understanding about how an action will affect the recipient, in this case, how a percentage of people don’t realise the effect they are having on Chris or Darren by using other services that they personally see little or no value in and which take away from their ability to use twitter effectively or communicate in a method that suits them.

By aiming to be fair to people who followed them they proceeded to return that favour to show that they value this act and appreciate it and are willing to open the lines of communication further it basically sounded the all clear for DMs to come racing in about all and nothing.

Rather than respecting the fact that they would have access to these people on a private level their followers have inadvertently abused it or not really realised the privilege they have thus forcing Chris Brogan and Darren Rowse to seriously consider the same actions as Jim Connolly and Seth Simonds.

So what did they do wrong?

Nothing. They did what they thought was best, remember Chris and Darren haven’t made any solid decisions yet but Seth and Jim where basically forced to take the step of reverting to zero, not something they enjoyed at all I assure you, because they simply could not communicate with people or where shifting though so much irrelevant info they where missing the important stuff.

What a terrible waste and if the Chris and Darren decided to take this course they will surely face some consequences and strife if they make the decision but little or indeed no other option is available to them it seems.

Personally I would support them 100% if they deemed this course of action the only viable option and it would not stop me from continuing to follow them but make your own decisions after you read their thoughts, these are their stories.

Jim Connolly

First up was @JimConnolly. Jim explains why he made the decision to unfollow about 20,000 followers and begin again.

*Jim unfollowed everyone AND removed all his followers as well effectively starting from scratch 100%, rather than keeping his follower count, something he has clarified in the comments and which I felt should be mentioned here.

Twitter and Me.

Seth Simonds

2nd came @SethSimonds. Seth wrote this post about making the decision to unfollow nearly 45 thousand followers on Twitter.

Why I Unfollowed Everybody on Twitter

Chris Brogan

Next up is @ChrisBrogan. Chris hasn’t made the decision to unfollow everyone, yet. But is seriously considering the option it seems. These posts came about from Chris over the last few weeks.

Twitter MUST Stop the Spam Use of APIs Now

and

Quid Pro No

Darren Rowse, Problogger

Finally, even Darren Rowse, or as he is more commonly known, @ProBlogger has hinted at his frustration publicly on twitter in these few tweets recently due to a deluge of Direct Messages that are of absolutely no value to him or which cause distraction.

Heres the URL from the Tweet: http://twitpic.com/cb6y4

This raises another question, in my mind, of all those other twitter users out there who have 10′s of 1000`s of followers, if not more, who use twitter in a dffernet capacity to the guys mentioned in this post but rather, use it as a promotional platform based around numbers.

Are they “doing it wrong?”.

Probably not, that’s the way they want to do it and those that follow them seem to accept that but on the flip side, none of them seem to mind or worry about actually making personal connections with people or building networks or relationships. Its a list and that’s all it is but if it works for them then that’s fine!

What would you do?

What would you do in this situation?  Would you stick it out and continue or make the decision to unfollow and begin again?  Maybe you would consider doing something else entirely?

*UPDATE*

It seems that things are happening a little quicker than I thought. I just read this post on Jim Connolly’s blog with more of the “big players” on twitter making the same decision to reset their follower counts to zero.

Scoble, Twitter and the wisdom of the crowd!

It looks like the times and attitudes in social media are changing again and dramatically so.