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I know, this is sort of counter intuitive, coming from a guy with almost a million followers.
But if you noticed, I’m working on pushing that number down.
Why?
Let me ask you: What do you find more effective?
Standing on top of a mountain and shouting to the people below.
Or
Conversing with like minded friends who are engaged in following your words and passionate about spreading them?
You can’t be Moses on Twitter.
Unless you’re a real celebrity.
In which case, you’re cheating, because everything you do is news (in a way) and there’s always going to be passionate people following your every move.
But if you’re a regular guy, or in my case, Twitter’s most followed regular guy, you want the engaged and passionate followers. You need them if you have any hope of becoming a real celebrity, published author, or achieve your project’s objectives.
You don’t need 1,000,000, you need 10,000
1,000,000 is nice. It gives you a psychological edge, but I’ve found it too difficult to wield as a weapon of mass productivity.
If I was CNN, sure, I’d have the resources, they would have a reason to care (people trust CNN), and more importantly, they have other ways of engaging with me beyond Twitter. CNN is everywhere.
Me. As a graduate student and soon to be resident of the frozen frontier, has a website. And Twitter. And … two cats. But I hold no power over them, in fact, the opposite is true.
Assuming most of you are not CNN, you’re like me and need to do things the old fashion way. Word of mouth marketing is not something new, it actually predates mass media advertising by a few decades.
And if you’re in that boat, you need each person following you to be passionate about what you’re doing and actively sharing it with their audience.
It’s that easy.
Or that difficult, if you’re a pessimist.
But we’re not pessimists here at SBI. This stuff is easy, it just takes a while, and you need to work hard.
But if you do, you’ll find that number go up, and it won’t be artificial, it’ll be organic. And organic gives you more benefits than artificial ever will. So if you get that organic following going, and you hit 1,000 or even 10,000 true, passionate fans, you can do everything a person with a million can, and you can do it better.
You can do it better because those 10,000 will buy your book and tell your friends about it. They’ll write positive reviews on Amazon.com, call the local media to get you coverage, and post to their own Twitter and Facebook profiles about you.
Will 1,000,000 people do that for you? Only if you’re a real celebrity, and if you are a real celebrity, you already have a PR team and media appearances scheduled. And because you’re a real celebrity, your audience might not automaticly buy your book, watch your show, or talk about what you’re doing.
Why do that when you have Leno doing it?
Now, it’s easy to sit here and talk about this. Seth Godin does it, but he’s Seth Godin, he can get away with doing it because in reality he’s a popular author.
But when I do it, I have to show you the results. And as SBI moves into Phase 2 (putting the book together), I hope to prove this theory to you.
In the interim, I’m trying to push my numbers down. I only want true fans following me. I can’t succeed without them.
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