Alice in Twitterland

I mentioned yesterday that I have two Twitter accounts—the “grown-up” one where I’m trying to show prospective hiring managers how socially with-it I am, as well as eager to soak up all the very latest technocrap, etc., etc., etc.—and the one I activated to try to drive traffic to my blog, and maybe connect to forensic/police sources.

Well, that’s been quite the eye-opener. On my non-professional Twitter profile page, I link to this blog. Since I started actively using it, maybe a month ago, around 100 people have “followed” me. (There are fewer now, because you can “unfollow” as well. And if a follow is not immediately reciprocated, people typically break the connection. Because it’s all about what they can get.) Of that number, three have actually clicked on the link to my blog. None of them has returned, that I can tell.

It’s enough to make a girl enter a convent. Without broadband.

So—people click “Follow” without having any notion of (or caring) who you are or what crack-brained theories you espouse, because once they’re connected to you, all that matters is that you look at whatever crack-brained crap they’re spewing out.

And, boy do they ever do that.

I follow about 140 people on this account—mostly writers, publishers, British cops (my novel is set in England, remember?) and just people who sound interesting. I’ve got a handful of “social media thought leaders” because they’ll follow anyone, and you need to have followers before people will follow you. (Look—of course it doesn’t make sense, but that’s the way it is. If I had a very large extended Italian family, I could just scoop them up, but I don’t, so I have to start out with what’s out there.)

(Or, actually, it’s possible to buy fake followers. People do that. People will do anything.)

The social media gurus do a fair amount of churning out their stuff, and I can pretty much skim that, because I’m picking it up on my professional account. Then there’s the category of aphorists—people who just like to upchuck the twitterized version of those inspirational posters corporations like to decorate their company walls with. I’ll deal with them separately.

But, you know what? It’s the writers (largely the self-publishing, e-book or paperback-only crowd, to be sure) who do nothing but endless, mind-numbing self-promotion, 140 characters at a time. Again and again and again.

I’m not sure when they have time to actually write their, you know, e-books & crap. And--as with the positive thinkers and thought leaders, they must have bots doing a lot of this, because I don’t think it’s possible for human fingers working at a regular keyboard to even cut-&-paste and click “post” as fast as they churn it out. There’s one woman, a writer of fantasies, in South Africa—one morning last week I counted more than 150 tweets from her in about a 40-minute period.

And then there were the retweets. That woman will retweet a ham sandwich. Especially if she’s mentioned in the mustard.

Then—later in the day, a whole new spate of the same old stuff.

I’m telling you—someone needs to take a machete to that woman’s Internet connection. Where are the damned crocodiles when you need them?

And let me just state the obvious, Spammer-twits: the instant I see your name in a tweet, I skip the content. Just like I don’t even see online ads or hear TV commercials. Your name means “nothing to see here, move on, move on”, so I do.