A blog about cities, buildings, and the people who make them work.

Let’s face it, twitter is a popularity contest and last night I decided to hang out with the cool kids. You know exactly who the cool kids are: the marketing whiz, the guru, the evangelist - the ever-present prophets of social media. I’ve been on twitter for about 6 months and… let’s face it, with only about 150 followers I’m the kid who’s still eating lunch alone in the corner. It was my time for a complete makeover, one worthy of it’s own TV show.

So last night I created a new twitter account with the hopes of hanging out with the cool kids. And there’s one thing I know about the cool kids: they follow a lot of people. I mean a LOT of people, sometimes up to 150,000. At 11pm, I created the account and started mass following around midnight. Before I went to bed, I was following almost 600 people. When I woke up at 7 this morning, I had almost 300 followers. I found out that hanging with the cool kids means tweeting about cool things like marketing, social media, networking, and SEO! SEO! SEO! (People love SEO for some reason.)

What I really wanted from this experiment was to see how long it would take to pass the current number of followers I have on my actual twitter account (150) by mass following and tweeting about popular subjects.The fact that I curated about 300 followers overnight may not be too impressive to some but if I were to do this every day, it could really add up. And add even more if I actually put considerable effort into it.

I’m not the first person to do this. Take for instance, Osen Komura, who followed 41,789 users in a month and had 7,847 users follow him. If Osen were to unfollow 40,000 people, he would seem to be a pretty popular twitter user, someone you might actually trust. I do believe many people have built a following on Twitter legitimately. Some because they are well known outside of the twitterverse, not because they are entertaining or helpful as a Twitter user. Others amass followers because they contribute a lot to Twitter and they are inherently fun to follow.

Even people like Robert Scoble, who previously suggested that it’s beneficial to follow many Twitter users because you gain more access to information and it shows that you’re listening and more open to communication or meeting people, are changing their opinions on the subject.

Honestly, I didn’t like hanging out with the cool kids at all! If I were truly following these people, I couldn’t stay up-to-date on what people were actually saying. And I don’t believe the cool kids can either. So if you want real online community, stay away from these people. And stay away from people who claim to be the saviors of  your small business woes or marketing experts and small biz PR gurus. And, please avoid people who want to evangelize social media. If any of you I just mentioned are reading this, you should know getting 124 auto-Direct Messages all saying the same thing is pretty annoying.

**A special thanks to Andy for helping me with this article.