I found myself in trouble on Twitter this morning ... ok "in trouble" might be a bit strong, but a tweet I received did make me realise something I was doing was causing offence and of course don't want to do that. In my "Direct Messages" (inbox) I received the following tweet. At first I thought #DM meant "Deep and Meaningful" ... what no deep and meaningful conversation?, what a weird thing to say ... but then I realised more seriously that they meant "Direct Messages".

So what happened, and why is this important?

juhasaarinen seems like a pretty cool person. Certainly they have an interesting blog, and write good articles. I followed them as I wanted to follow their tweets, and I guess they followed me in return. All good until this point. The problem was I use a service call Tweet Later, and had set up an 'Auto Direct Message' to say "hello and thank you for following me", in it I pointed harmlessly to my blog. Tweet Later is a service for managing your tweets, and other twitter activity. As I got busier on Twitter, and the number of people following me grew, I found it more and more difficult to respond and say thank you in a timely manner. I thought it more polite to send an 'auto thank you' quickly than attempt to send a personalised one knowing in most cases I probably never will. I realise now that's wrong. Twitter is about a conversation, I joined and love it because I get to connect with our clients who are photographers, my friends and people in the Wordpress community ... actually anyone that wants to say hello. Auto responders might be efficient but they aren't personal and they aren't about conversation or entertainment. With Twitter being overwhelmed with spam, it also sends the wrong message about who you are. So my thanks goes to juhasaarinen for this reminder ... DM Auto Replies are now turned off ... Tweet Later however is still helpful in many other ways."

Having said that, is their response being short sighted?

I don't want to give with one hand, and then take away with the other. The learning is certainly appreciated, but I do think the response could be a little short sighted. If something about my profile made the "follow" worth while in the first place ... is an instant "un-follow" necessary. Of course I respect their right to, and appreciate that setting standards is important, but I think a persons previous updates and blog etc says a lot more about them than a single #DM message.

Which brings me to another service I enjoy

Twitalyzer is really interesting. It allows you to review, at least from Twitalyzer's perspective, your behaviour on Twitter. The Idea of Generosity is clearly important in a conversation as it shows how much you contribute. On Twitter this is done by sharing information (links) and by re-tweeting (RT) others. I'm therefore reasonably happy with those figures. I don't care to much about velocity as I spend as much time there as I want, and don't want to spam my followers. The 1500 tweets a week, that this is measured against seems exceptionally high so question if this measure is set realistically. In terms of 'clout' and 'influence', I guess we all want to have some influence over the people we communicate with and therefore took most interest in those being so low and that's where this service has so much value. If I cared about influence, and wanted to be a "Twitter Star" then it tells me what I need to do. Relative to the 1161 people Twitalyzer are tracking that have 25% more influence than me, I would need to send out about 40 more tweets a week, reference a lot more (20 ish) online resources and Reweet at least another couple times each week. Of course I would also need to make sure the content of those tweets was of value or no one will follow.

Seems simple ... But do I care?

Yes and No. I do care in that I want to be a valuable twitter community member, and of course I want to be a little entertaining or provide information to the people gracious enough to follow me, but I don't have any aspiration to be a Twitter Heavy Weight. I'm there to have fun, and learn what I can, and it seems that is what juhasaarinen wants as well, so that is why we should NOT Auto Direct Message.