I overheard a conversation between the marketing interns at work. One of them was training the other on how to manage the Twitter account we have. Basically, the instructions were to follow other people at random, keep track and see who followed us back, and to eventually stop following people who didn't.

I'll concede that I really haven't figured out how to use Twitter yet, but I do know that the worst corners of it are those accounts being used to hawk products, like dietary supplements for bodybuilders or viagra, where everyone is trying to get anyone who will to follow them, and where people follow others based on reciprocity. Sometimes these people have thousands of followers and are following as many people. Nobody's keeping track of all of these things. It's a free-for-all, everyone's yelling, nobody's listening.

I try to say things that are interesting or entertaining. I follow others who offer me the same. I don't follow anyone who follows me and don't expect that from people I follow.

I'm not sure the whole "link exchange" model that drove online marketing almost a decade ago translates to social media. Me, I'd rather have 10 people following me who genuinely like what I have to say than 10,000 people following me because I promised to enter them into a contest to win an iPad.