A growing trend online is getting to be more about making connections with people rather than resources.
The litmus for this observation is how many twitter accounts do you follow that tweet exclusively links? None of the twitter accounts I read post only links. I don’t care to read a bunch of links excruded out by some bot. Even if the links are hand-posted by someone, if they don’t tweet any at-replies to people, it shows me they are only yelling and not listening.
If people are going to spend the time listening to you, you have to listen back.
We are tempted as authors and publishers to try to get our work out there in as many channels as possible. When twitter exploded onto the scene in early 2009, I thought this would be a great channel for people to follow niche-focused twitter accounts that give links on a specific topic.
I found that people don’t care to follow a twitter account that gives just links in one topic area. People want to follow people. Or at the very least, they want to follow a brand that has a persona.
This applies not only to twitter, but to all other forms of publishing and syndication. We can no longer just shotgun our message out and hope people hear it. We need to make communications that speak to people as people.
Looking at my quora feed, i saw mostly random questions from the 200 topics I’m following–wait–I’m following 200 topics? I couldn’t see any of the posts from the people I’m following. I want to see the posts/questions from the people I know. I didn’t care for the 200 topics.
That made me realize another thing. People want people, not topics.
BTW, if you like, you can follow me on quora at: http://www.quora.com/Matt-Maldre