I have recently entered an entirely new (for me) internet world: the marketing Web. My Etsy shop,
an attempt to offset some of my online costs, opened recently, after
several weeks of research, exploration, and reading about online
selling.

I've read article after article on using social media — Facebook, Flickr, Twitter
— to sell something. Promote yourself! Sell your product! Use these
'social' media to do it. And see, I've done it — all those links are
to my own accounts.

Many of these articles recommend tools to bump up your numbers, number
of people you follow, and number of people who follow you. Follow
everyone who follows you, they say; and unfollow those who don't
reciprocate. This advice is totally contrary to how I am accustomed to
using these services.

I joined Flickr when it was still Beta. In fact, it was rather like Twitter + Twitpic
is now: a chat room with photos. Chat, as in conversation, as in
reciprocity, mutuality.

Not mutuality of following, but mutuality of
interest, attention, and responsiveness. Several of the people I 'met'
then are still my friends — my online, valued, appreciated friends. Friends who welcomed and guided this awkward, uniformed
introvert in her initial attempts to be social.

I hate to sound old-fashioned, and I don't want to imply that there was
some 'golden age of the internet' — but it does seem to me that there
were some common, shared values among many of us at that time, so long
ago.

As a blogger, I felt some responsibility to keep my blogrolls
interesting; to not stuff them with blogs that my readers would find
disappointing, merely to get an exchange link. On Flickr, I 'follow'
friends, and folks who have great photos and fascinating lives. On
Twitter — where I've also been for a long time, I follow people
who tweet poems and have intriguing conversations.

It is tedious to go through followers one at a time, to confirm that
they are real people. It's tedious because the non-people use the same
tools to follow everyone on Twitter, so there they are — following me.
As if some male-enhancement seller is interested in what this reclusive
female Montana poet has to say.

I have discovered, with a new Twitter account I set up just for this
experiment, that there is value to following tons of people. It's an
entirely different experience than my quiet, mellow, thoughtful
personal account — but it is also exciting, and revealing, and
interesting. All these people! All these different lives and opinions!
I like it.

Why would I unfollow someone interesting, just because they don't
follow me? It took awhile for me to figure out why this is advised.

It's because Twitter, in its guard against spammers, looks at
follow/follower ratios. If you follow way more people than follow you,
the Twitter robot gets suspicious. So, if you are only looking for high
numbers, you want to keep that ratio close. Thus, unfollow anyone who
doesn't return the favor.

I feel for all these folks, who may have had an online shop for ages,
but who are new to the rest of the internet; who will accept this
'follow-unfollow' advice, only to find their Twitter feeds stuffed with
spam and pornography, and the folks in whom they might have an actual
interest buried therein. Of course they will wonder: What's the point?

Well, numbers are not the point.

It's like stuffing one's shop or blog with keywords and tags that may
bring lots of hits, but leave the hitters disappointed — they don't
find what they came for. Hits, and numbers, aren't the point. The point
is to connect with people who are interested in what you are doing.

Beyond that, though, follow-all undermines the efforts these services
make to stop spam. Every time a spammer gets followed, they get
validated; the spam robot thinks this is a real account, a real person.
Why else would they get so many followers?

This is a diservice to us all. It encourages even more misuse of the service. It pays the spammers to misuse the service.

It's anti-social. It's a dismissal of shared responsibility for our shared communities.

Don't do it.