Warning - This may be the most trivial thing I've ever blogged. Stop reading now if you're looking for insights into customer experience, business strategy or anything of value really.
A few months back I started to use Twitter in earnest. (Before that, I only ever tweeted that I was updating Twitter, but some serious people started to follow my tweets and the joke wore thin).
I have to confess, I still don't know why I should Tweet. I do it because I feel a need to be involved with new media and it's there and it doesn't take up much time. However, I don't derive great pleasure from it and it hasn't altered the way I behave... at least, nothing like as much as Digg, Facebook, Delicious, iGoogle and other social media did. Things got easier when I started to use Tweetdeck instead of Twitter's web interface. Pretty soon I intend to download a solution to my mobile device, so that I can take snaps, post them to Twitpic or Flickr and I guess it would be easier still if I used some software to automate Tweets like Guy Kawasaki and other ueber-Twitterers seem to, but that doesn't feel right to me.
More experienced Twitterers, like my colleague Jeremiah, have spent time to work out how firms can use the medium to engage with customers and promote their brands.
So... There I was, gathering a few followers and making a few Tweets, checking out the various sites that produce all kinds of statistics about my influence in the Twittersphere. I was struggling to think of something to do with Twitter and I came up with ... Parity.
I decided to see if I could end up with an exactly equal number of "Following" , "Followers" and "Updates". At first, I had to ration my updates - frequent enough to keep people interested, but not faster than the rate at which I was picking up followers.
When I got to 270 followers, people actually started following me in batches of five or six per day - and I actually ended up falling behind in Updates. And then today, I finally got close enough that I could post this message:
"Celebrating parity >>> 301 following, 301 followers, 301 updates. <<< Let's have a parity party!"
A thing of beauty to admire?
Moments after that Tweet, someone decided to burst my bubble by un-following me. Haha:
So ... I'm going to stop this pointless game now. I'll Tweet whatever I feel like Tweeting, whenever I feel like Tweeting.
But I throw down the challenge to anyone who wants to better my score of parity at 301. (I'm sure it's easy if you go for it without regard to the quality of your posts and the ruthlessness with which you pursue followers and purge your following list).
