www.nickhodge.com

I have been on twit­ter since Feb­ru­ary 2007 as @NickHodge. Nearly 4 years. In that time, my account has gathered nearly 5000 fol­low­ers. Whilst I have no accur­ate data on these fol­low­ers: it is fair to say a major­ity are spam­bots or dormant accounts. There is abso­lutely no way I am that inter­est­ing to 5000 people.

Con­sid­er­ing my twit­ter per­sona has been cheeky and some­what icon­o­clastic, even to my present employer; and the con­tent of 90% of my tweets are not related to work — I find it sur­pris­ing to gather so many pieces of moss.

5000 fol­low­ers does put the @NickHodge account into the top 20% of Aus­tralian twit­ter­ers. Being an open (not locked) account, this puts my utter­ances on twit­ter into the fun­nel for social media mon­it­or­ing engines. Their sys­tems will determ­ine my fol­lower count (and retweet count, and other met­rics) puts me into a “must watch” list.

I base this assess­ment on my work use of social media mon­it­or­ing engines. Keywords, key people. Asso­ci­ated, and you are prime bait for engines to watch fil­ter and report to their cor­por­ate stakeholders.

Some people crave this atten­tion. In fact, it is their life blood. I am per­fectly fine with their need for fol­low­ers, read­ers, fans if you will. But this is not for me. The dir­ect asso­ci­ation between my employer and what I say and think is not dir­ect. At best, it is loosely coupled.

There is no quick mech­an­ism to com­pletely delete all your fol­low­ers, and who you are fol­low­ing in twit­ter. As an imme­di­ate solu­tion, I have sus­pen­ded post­ing from the @NickHodge account and cre­ated @RealNickHodge. I am being strict as to whom I fol­low; the account is locked.

For me, it is back to feel­ing free to com­ment without the fear of caus­ing col­lat­eral damage.