I will follow you, will you follow me?

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The voice of Phil Collins singing this ballad now seems oddly prophetic of our current digital landscape.

I spend a bit of time sifting through the various thinkers that provide strategy within this space. When you distill the messaging down, the basic premise for an identity for success in this space is to channel the Spirit of Crazy Eddie. If you do not recall Eddie, Bob’s Furniture is today’s obvious incarnation.

Now, the one exception in my experience that recognized the limitations of this approach was a fascinating presentation Brian Clark gave at SOBCon. He challenged those gathered to think beyond the cult of personality and to consider both crossroads positioning and power of the metaphor. Noting the difficulty of successful metaphoric positioning, Clark went on to explain the crossroads, whereby you place your content stream at the crossroads of two distinct yet related audiences or markets.

So a question. What can be done for the thousands upon thousands of new users in this space that immediately get up on the soapbox and scream: Do you want to gain thousands of followers a day? Like an obnoxious tv commercial, I immediately go: CLICK. You?

Mark V. McDonnell

Richard, I'd add that your own authority, your own distinctiveness (OK, I'll say it: your own "brand") has accumulated in a manner that is more picaresque than pointed.

And is all the greater for it!

ccseed

well...no matter where you go, there you are. (and the view is fine.

Fred H Schlegel

It's funny. I hadn't been noticing that as much and so I thought it had died down. Turns out I've tuned them out. My eyesight blurs when I see it on twitter, I click past before the page finishing loading when I hit a website. My brain seems to be establishing it's own spam filter that operates at a level I'm not paying attention to. Maybe that's what will help in general. Folks craving attention will alter tactics when attention is not given.

ccseed

Good point Fred. It's got so much of the \"gold rush\" metality bound
up with it, and in the end, most of the activity around generating

this behavior equates to \"salting\" the mine...that's when, as I

learned from Lon Woodbury out in Idaho earlier this summer, when

they'd use a shotgun to scatter gold fragments into an area and create

a buying frenzy to the ususpecting greenhorns...