I’m sure an iPad will end up in our house – but not as a replacement to books.

So I thought about it by going back to “life before social media.” People leave companies all the time as I said. Some cannot work for competitors due to non-compete agreements they signed with the companies. Others cannot disclose “company secrets” with non-disclosure agreements. How does it work now that social media is in the mix? Well the major difference is you’re out in the open being seen and heard by all. More than ever people can get to know you, how you engage/interact with people and what you say about your company or in general. This creates a certain perception and bam, you’re that brand. We see and even interact with people from Dell, Kodak, Comcast and other brands on social networks and at the end of the day they are people (who represent these companies) like us.

One thing we both agreed on strongly was that if you’re a new person at a new brand, you have to earn trust for yourself and the brand. A case in point is, I started a position at a company six months ago and didn’t just walk into this position easily. It was a newly created position for me in a traditional, conservative environment. No one knew who I was and what I did. It’s a continuouos education process, tough at times, but like anything you have to persevere and prove yourself to earn respect.

In the end, it really is a personal decision. Unfortunately, I do not know any folks who formerly represented a prominent brand and went to a new one but would love to get their point of view. Let’s hope we do.

You are right. This all gets forgotten in the end (Tiger who? ha).

Thanks for blogging about this point. It’s a great one.

Pro spammers will either do that or block you for not following them, which can hurt your reputation, so I just block as soon as I see someone who obviously isn’t going to really read anything I write. This keeps the follower count down below the count of those I follow.

I will only make one comment on your replies and that comment relates to

“I see the author has not yet followed more than 700, which means he wasn’t interested to sell his firm’s message to a group that he targeted so much as he has wanted people to find him on their own. It looks “good” that he has 1000 more followers than follows, but they are people who, like him, aren’t even approaching the 2000 follow limit so they can afford it that he doesn’t follow them back. They can find him interesting and that is that.”

any one who follows me on twitter can judge my tweets. Nothing to hide on twitter. I rarely push my company on my account, its a personal account and that is that.

I dont follow everyone because most accounts are bots or fake. if twitter deleted all the junk accounts, i am sure my follow to follower ration would be close.

Here is whom I unfollow quickly. Note that I am assuming that the stream is not meant to be read (cannot be read logically unless I only follow 10 people) and anyone I find interesting I am going to visit on my own regardless of whether I am following them – whether I follow someone is irrelevant to whether I read their Twitter page regularly or not:

1) If someone tweets a lot and follows a lot fewer than follow them…I give them only a week or less to have noticed me as a new follower, possibly read my tweets and made the decision not to follow. That tells me that the person is probably not a potential partner. If they are really potentially important, I will unfollow and then, months later, try a new follow.

Note that my follow behavior bears no relation to whether I regularly read their page or not. I regularly read @TheMediaIsDying and major media accounts for instance, but I would never follow them because they don’t follow back and I’d never see their tweets when I want to see them anyway.

2) If someone is really important, I will RT what they say that is interesting. I often do this at the moment I unfollow them so they are given one last chance to follow back. If nothing I do to help them spread their message causes them to follow back, I conclude they don’t know how to use Twitter and think they don’t need help spreading their company’s message. I may consider not to approach them in real life in favor of the many, many potential partners who had followed back and interacted.

Note again that I may still regularly read the account of someone I don’t follow because of a non-follow attitude of the other account like @themediaisdying or @deliverability. Following and reading bear almost no relation to each other. The stream runs too fast for this not to be so.