How should organizations manage following?

by Ben on April 2nd, 2009

Im going to show off my twitter newness:

I have a little twitter question: Who should @new_life_ranch follow? Its easy  for me to figure out who i should follow on my personal twitter account (i just decide…). But @new_life_ranch is different. Its not me, its an organization.

Right now i have 3 schools of though:

follow everyone who follows @nlr. I like this because it lets people know we want to connect with them, the conversational aspect of twitter, if you want to engage with people following them is part of that.  I dont like it because the reality is i will never actually keep up with the (potential) stream, so why fake it? Ill end up following lots of spammers.

Follow some people. I thought about only following other organizations that we have some sort of relationship with (churches, dayspring, other camps).

Follow nobody.  what i like: it keeps things simple. If people want to contact us through twitter they can @reply and DM, so its not like we would be cutting ourselves off completely. There is no chance i will insult somebody (i have been coming for 10 years, how come you followed that spam guy but not me?) what i dont like: its cold, and not very relational…and camp is inherently relational. Some people may be turned off by us not following them.

I did an informal organization survey and people are all over the board on this. Some organizations follow some, all and none. And there is some conversation about this:

http://www.twitip.com/why-following-too-many-people-will-cost-you/

http://www.twitip.com/how-to-follow-alot-of-people-on-twitter-and-still-be-engaging-using-tweetdeck/

Most of the conversation is focus on individuals (or individuals who are brands, like Chris Brogan)

Right now im leaning toward following everybody, but being willing to unfollow if they are clearly just looking for traffic. Then just checking in with the stream every now and then to see if there is something to engage in. And of course be very engaged when people to talk directly to our about nlr

I would love to hear thoughts on this. Where am i wrong? where am i right? If you follow an organization what are your exceptions for how they will interact with you? Do you feel they are disengaged if they dont follow you back?

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