If you’re following 1,000 people and 800 are following you thats fine. Keep in mind that as you follow more people you’re going to have to remove those that do not follow you back to keep your ratio balanced.

What's missing here? Conversation. He says little about listening to the people he follows, or interacting with them. They're simply audience. All kinds of services exist where people can acquire Twitter audiences, or even buy them. But communication with all those people broadcasting to each other has scant value, because, chances are, they aren't listening either. Everyone's spamming.

For an experiment, I joined a service called a service called FastFollowers (since redubbed "Twiends"). I blogged about it. The result was that I got lots of followers, and none of them paid me the least bit of attention.

I'll confess, I started on Twitter two years ago with the intention of building an audience around my upcoming book. I was thinking largely along Sean's line. But the greatest value of Twitter, I found, is that you surround yourself with people who point to all kinds of interesting news, articles, photos, and ideas. And looking at it from a marketing point of view, if you follow people that you find interesting, good chance they'll listen to you.  

A new Harris Interactive survey shows that even in this spammy world we inhabit, the overwhelming majority of people still open their e-mail boxes for the right offers. According to Harris, 96% of adults have provided their email address to receive special offers or more information.(I agreed to receive this news by e-mail, which I guess helps to prove the point.) Additionally, 73% of respondents say they are more willing to make a purchase from a brand they have signed-up with.

The sponsor of this study, a lead-generation company called Pontiflex, is eager to demonstrate that people who agree to receive mailings--those who "opt in"--make for valuable customers. Creating and selling lists of people who have opted in is its business.

I wonder about the sophistication of the e-mailing public. I keep a Hotmail account for virtually all of my commercial dealings. Those relationships are quarantined from the rest of my online life, and I'd imagine that Hotmail address is worth next to nothing as a lead. Do you maintain similar accounts? What does that say about lead generation? Are those of us with multiple accounts still a minority? (Cross-posted on Blogspotting.net)

Remember Mad-libs, those word games where you fill in random adjectives, adverbs and nouns and then read them in a ridiculous text? Well, from what Jeff Jarvis is reporting, the spam-bloggers, or sploggers, are teaching that same skill to computers. He reports that a blog post of his was altered for a splog, presumably to get past spam filters. It reproduced his post, but substituted "inaugural touch dances" for "opening tap dances."

It's pretty crude, actually, about on the level of some of the automatic translation software on the Net. But still, the idea that they teach machines to edit our words is impressive. And some of the edits aren't half-bad. The machine turned "annual confab" into "period schmooze." (I'd drop "period," but "schmooze" is worthy.) If you look at the splogs as a relentless publishing force, engineering billions and billions of posts to create millions of survivors, some emerging through this Darwinian process might turn out to be brilliant. Some of my old Mad-libs were. At least, that's how I remember them.

(also posted on Blogspotting.net)