Twitter + Social Media experts

So, I’m a twitterer. Granted, 12 months too late – but early adopting is not a term I’m overtly familiar with. Some initial thoughts? Ok, sure. Firstly, a couple of healthy caveats. A: I’m a month old twitterer, so maybe I just don’t get it yet. B: I’m not very bright, so maybe I just don’t get it.

But, and there is a but, something bothers me. Three days after joining I found myself with five new followers. All but one of these followers’ bios stated themselves to be ’social media experts’. (I wonder what percentage of Twitter users are ’social media experts’?)

Why was I being followed? There is no information in my profile, I am not a minor celebrity and I had, up to that point, two very non-descript updates. The only reason I could find is that I had chosen to follow Chris Brogan and that this validated me as Social Media fodder.

Not that this hugely bothered me. Follow me if you feel, and I in turn will follow you. (Does Twitter etiquette exist?)

But then I looked upon my twitter feed. ‘Off for a shower’, ‘Seven hours until the plane’, ‘OJ for breakfast’ etc. Not only do I not know these people, but I’m having minute by minute updates of their hugely inane lives. Sure, before you shout ‘duurrr – that’s the point of twitter’, I appreciate that fully. But why did these ’social media experts’ follow me in the first place? To hear about my life, or to possibly penetrate my network in the hope of building business connections. Supposedly, in doing this, they want to impress me, or my network with their social media expertise – or ‘hey, look at me, I totally get Twitter – let’s connect’.

Well no, you’re now blocked. Your crap choked my twitter feed so anything interesting from either yourselves or others was lost among your twoddle. It smacks very much to me of the ‘add as many friends on MySpace as you can’ school of online marketing. Just because the technology is different, it doesn’t mean that the lessons we have learned over and over again from other social media platforms don’t exist. Don’t add everyone and anyone, don’t shout at me all day, don’t assume that I’m interested in anything you have to say. Because I’m not, and actually, I find you marauding into my social circle like a bull in a china shop massively insulting.

Ironically, those people who I have chosen to follow, the likes of ViralBlog, whose updates are relevant, regular and insightful are the ones who do not have ‘Social media expert’ in their bios. Continue to wear your sandwich boards, I just hope people don’t fall for it. Alas, as brands clamour onto Twitter and the undoubted benefits that can derive from a well co-ordinated campaign (see Eureka, the US sci fi series) I think, sadly, that they will.

Ho hum