“Do interesting things.” The short version of what Jake-from-the-office™ had to say about yet another ‘how to get more followers’ piece offering the same old pointers predicated on the underlying canard that victory in the game of Twitter is counted in acolytes, indeed that it can be counted at all.
Take one Walter Mitty, pictured above in his imminent big screen debut revival. “I can’t seem to leave a ‘wink’ for someone,” complains Walter, as the opening gambit of the latest trailer. “Okay,” comes the reply, “I’m looking at your profile. You’ve left a lot of this stuff blank.”
Sat behind a desk, distracting himself from the tedium of his day job by escaping onto the social web, it’s easy to imagine Walter measuring his days in follows, and likes, and shares, acquired through the efficient propagation of other people’s content and ideas. Isn’t this exactly the life he yearns to escape from?
Now imagine Walter’s adventures conveyed through the social channels he might use to share them. Places discovered, sights seen, moments of insight and inspiration gleaned from the pinnacles, literal and figurative, of human experience, available through the peculiar prism of perspective that is one Walter Mitty.
Walter isn’t shaping his adventure around your hopes and expectations, he’s being guided by his own. Maybe you despise him for it, maybe he’s a terrible follow, because all he does is remind you all day that you’re the one who hasn’t done anything noteworthy or mentionable. Does that mean he should tone it down, stick to the retweets?
Online influence, if that’s the particular kool-aid you’re chasing, is about finding your audience, large or small, smart or stupid. Sure, the more you have, the greater the chance of overlap. But that’s no strategy, no more than owning more stopped clocks is going to improve your timekeeping.
Miley Cyrus got a lot more followers after she took her clothes off. I think her influence actually went down.