Getting the Word Out - 2

(Please see also Getting the Word Out )

More thoughts as they arise:

• Thought 1:

No matter what I’m publishing, it’s going public because *I* think it is of value to the world out there. I should, at the very least, Tweet everything I publish. It is up to my Twitter followers to decide whether what I create is of value or interest to them; it’s not for me to decide their likes and dislikes.

• Thought 2:

Some blog items, Clear Thinking is a good example, are immediate candidates to be appended to my “From The Blogs” section in the embryonic next-month’s issue of the eLetter. By appending them as I publish them, I reduce time spent looking for articles at the next publishing date. My function is reduced to that of deleting unwanted items.

• Thought 3:

Tweets automatically get posted to LinkedIn and from there, I think, my LinkedIn groups or connections get notified; I’m not sure how that works, but I do see that LinkedIn notices all my tweets.

• Thought 4:

Most blogs, and Clear Thinking is one of the set, don’t warrant an entry in an updated LinkedIn summary. That area is better suited for new products or service of a major nature.

• Thought 5:

Having begun the process of documenting the procedures for publishing, I find that I discard 50% of my bookmarked news items! They’ve been sitting there for so long that I can no longer recall why I thought that they were important. Dealing with them through my speedy process at the time they arise will mean a better harvest for me.

• Thought 6:

My Twitter audience is business-oriented, and while most of us will glance at twitter during the weekend, the majority seem to be desk-bound, like me. It makes sense to use a service such as Twuffer to schedule tweets on the weekend to appear the following Monday or Tuesday during business hours.

• Thought 7:

My preference is to compose my web items in Microsoft Word and compile them to web pages, then copy from the web pages to the blogs. This gives me a chance to examine, inspect the material, test links and so on before making the issue public. For example, a candidate for Macros In Minutes gets posted to http://www.chrisgreaves.com/MacrosInMinutes/index.htm before being posted to http://macrosinminutes.blogspot.com/ .

• Thought 8:

A working document has been made: Getting the Word Out - 3

Talk to Me !

Where Have all the Followers gone?

With apologies to Peter, Paul and Mary , whose name popped into my mind this morning as I discarded yet another email alert from Twitter: “Joe Blogs is now following you on Twitter!”, with an exclamation mark to get me all excited.

DELETE.

But it made me think of how frequently I receive these email alerts, and Management Measures , so I waded back through my email folders (I have a folder for each month’s emails, “Trash201110, Trash201109, Trash201108 etc.” and made a quick tally of emails announcing my Devoted Followers:

		Cumulative
Mar	14	14
Apr	22	36
May	11	47
Jun	20	67
Jul	25	92
Aug	23	115
Sep	33	148
Oct	20	168
Current		52

Now I had also received by email twitters statistics for the merry week of this, and in it I noted “Followers=51; Growth this week=2; Prediction next week=49”, and leaving behind the question of why a growth of 2 this week might lead to fewer followers next week, I pondered why, after 168 announcements of followers, I have retained only 30% of the camp.

The rest have de-camped, it seems.

“BeerGuy”, “SexyTeen” and “DeadMeat” along with them, I hope.

Twitter, of course, never sends me an email lamenting the loss of a follower, only another young hopeful who has been led to believe that by following me they’ll look good and land that multi-million dollar contract.

“Give up!”, is my message. I’m having enough trouble as it is landing a multi-thousand dollar contract, let alone boosting total strangers to vast riches.

How about you?

How many followers have you attracted and lost, and do you care?

Talk to Me !