Well really I don’t care who you make sweet love to:

• Twitter followers
• Facebook fans
• LinkedIn connections
• Foursquare mayors

Just love, love, love ‘em.

Chris Brogan said it much more professionally here:

Our Responsibility as Media Channels

Attention is a currency, and if we spend too much of other people’s attention on frivolous posts and shares, we risk losing that attention.

As social media becomes easier and easier to do you have the ability of sending endless garbage to your followers.

I actually saw Guy Kawasaki (no I’m not linking to your Twitter profile, Guy) go on stage, as the keynote at a Search Engine Strategies conference and show how “easy” it was to get people to retweet anything he said.

He randomly picked a recipe off of some site (live on stage) and we watched as people just mindlessly retweeted his garbage.

I was embarrassed for everybody.

The only way you can win the content wars is through quality… not quantity.

Take a look at this Followerwonk report Comparing of Twitter followers of graywolf & leeodden & aaronwall - 3 highly regarded search marketing experts.

(If you’ve never used Followerwonk, I highly recommend playing around with it a bit. It will show you Twitter in a way you never saw it before.)

Follower Wonk: Twitter analytics, follower segmentation, social graph tracking, and more

Here are their Twitter accounts (unlike Guy Kawasaki, I’d strongly encourage you to follow all three):

• Michael Gray @graywolf
• Lee Odden @leeodden
• aaron wall @aaronwall

Here is a comparison of the average number of tweets each of them do a week:

You can see that graywolf more than doubles the number of tweets leeodden does. And aaronwall is a small percentage of both.

All three of these guys got on Twitter about the same time. (Actually leeodden and graywolf literally joined Twitter the very same day.)

I ran this report on November 17, 2010. As of that day here are the total number of tweets each did:

• graywolf - 42,925 tweets
• leeodden - 19,797 tweets
• aaronwall - 4,884 tweets

Graywolf is prolific.

But take a look at this chart of average number of new followers per day:

Leeodden is outpacing both of them.

And then finally, here are the total number of followers:

 

• graywolf - 17,214 followers
• leeodden - 33,264 followers
• aaronwall - 22,488 followers

That chart also shows the cross-over of followers for each of them.

Here is what I DON’T want you to take away from this:

Leeodden having more followers (and getting more followers every day) has nothing to do with the number of tweets he sends out. Do not try to reverse engineer the number of tweets you need to put out to be successful.

Aaronwall gets more followers per day than graywolf even though he “barely” posts (compared to the other two).

The secret to leeodden’s success is quality. He puts out really good material.

I highly encourage you to read some of his blog posts and his tweets. It is evident that he spends a significant amount of time on his content.

Leeodden is making sweet love to his Twitter followers down by the fire. (I really wanted to make that the title of this post. But I chickened out.)

Following aaronwall is no biggie for you. He doesn’t post a lot but it’s a good read. So please follow him too.

Graywolf is a lot of information. But I still want you to follow him. That’s because he is doing important work in testing the boundaries and capabilities of Twitter. He is a well known experimenter in Twitter automation.  Even though there is a lot of automation, you might find it hard to separate the automatic stuff from the live stuff. His Twitter feed is quite good.

By following others who are very successful in social media, you can learn techniques to make yourself more successful.

But it all just boils down to this:

Love your followers. 

Oh… and as an added bonus, there are 41 people that all 3 of those guys follow. And then there are another 19 that graywolf and aaronwall follow.

If you are seriously into the search engine world, you probably want to follow all of those people as well. But have no fear! I’ve put them in a Twitter list for your enjoyment.

You can get that list here:

Twitter / @sagerock/oga-special-list

I’m going to tell you the story of a social media master who laughed at me when I told him I was sitting with the foursquare mayor of his restaurant.

This guy probably has never been on Facebook, Twitter or Youtube. But all of us social media “experts” would do well to study his technique.

As we are sitting at the sushi bar of Golden Dragon Restaurant in Cuyahoga Falls Ohio, Frank S., the foursquare mayor says to me: “Ask Hon to show you his cobra snake bite.”

“You did not get bit by a cobra,” I say in disbelief.

“I sure did,” Hon says showing me a white welt between his thumb and forefinger There’s a nasty scar like he was in a knife fight. “When I was 10 in the Cambodian jungle.”

“Did you go to the doctor,” I naively ask him.

He laughs at me again. “What’s a doctor? Mud and piss is how I treated it.”

Political commentary of the GOP debates is playing on the TV above the bar.

“Are you a Republican,” I ask.

“I don’t like either Democrats or Republicans. In wrestling, Hulk Hogan and Rody Piper both come out yelling and screaming at each other. After the match they sit together in the back laughing and counting all their money. That’s what Democrats and Republicans do.”

“Where I come from we want the government as far away from us as possible. In Cambodia the closer the government gets to you the more likely it is you are going to get killed.”

He then patiently recounts his story of walking through the landmine filled jungles of Cambodia to escape the Khmer Rouge. He walked the distance of Chicago to Akron making his way to a Thailand refugee camp.

He did this at the age of 10 years old with his two brothers and mother.

“Your dad didn’t go,” I ask.

“He got blown up by a landmine.”

I say I’m sorry. He easily makes a joke about wanting reparations.

He had relatives that had moved to Canada and Australia. So his mother tried to apply to move there. They weren’t accepting refugees at the time. They then ran out of time. The camp ran out of money and his family was sent back to Cambodia… the same Chicago to Akron trip through the landmine-infested jungle only eating what they could find along the way.

They didn’t give up. They eventually once again made the trip back to Thailand.

This time they had a sponsor… a church in Akron Ohio.

That was enough to get them over here. America was sensitive to the cause and had room.

Hon, Ming, Chai and his mother moved to Akron. The kids went to North High School. Their mom had a skill. She was a seamstress. Otherwise they probably would have gone to the Philippines.

The mayor asks, “How did you afford this restaurant?”

Hon says “entitlements.”

We’re quiet for a minute. Hon then laughs and says, “No, man. The owner before us had enough of running a business. We just took it over from him.”

I’m sitting there on the edge of my seat. My mouth is gaping open.

Hon says, “Do you know the movie “The Killing Fields”? That was my life. Do you remember the blue tent at the end of the movie? That was the Thai refugee camp I spent two years in. They had ice cream and free food. It was heaven. In Cambodia I lived in a cave. I drank the same water the cows pissed in.”

He says, “Today my daughter tells me she wants a flu shot. I tell her I see her washing her hands all the time. What does she need a flu shot for. The west is the only place in the world where people have food allergies. It’s because we all have so much.”

“In Cambodia we were allowed to own 2 things: a neckerchief and a spoon. 1 spoon. Everything else was owned by the government. If you took a piece of fruit off a tree you were stealing from the government.”

I am sucked in. I can’t believe the story I’m hearing.

And you know what, when I’m in Akron there is no other sushi for me than the Golden Dragon Restaurant in Cuyahoga Falls Ohio.

It’s great sushi. That’s no doubt. But now it’s more than sushi for me. It’s a family living the American dream to its fullest. It is a place of love, happiness, hope and dreams that have come true. It has magic.

Good social media has magic. But there’s no trick to it. It tells a story. It pulls its viewers in. It has a soul. It’s honest and open. That’s the secret to social media.

It’s Thursday 11/17/2011 at about 2:15 Eastern Time.

I’m watching the Occupy Wall Street protest live at: http://www.ustream.tv/theother99

The segment I’m currently watching is being broadcast by Tim Pool: http://twitter.com/#!/timcast

He has been covering this protest live, non-stop since 7:00am using nothing more than his cell phone with 4G and 4 donated Energizer XP18000 backup batteries. (After 8.5 hours his first battery is still at 75% power.)

Here is a picture of him from MSNBC:

This is been interesting to watch because of the stark difference between his broadcast and CNN.

Here is a screenshot of his broadcast on ustream.tv:

At this time he has nearly 28,000 current views with a total of 314,000 total views. The broadcast also has a live chat feed tied into the ustream chat, Facebook and Twitter on the right.

He is exhausted and wants to take a break. He won’t. His hands are freezing because he has no gloves. Someone is supposed to be bringing him gloves but they are a mile away.

It was raining for about an hour. He used a plastic bag to protect his camera. He really wanted an umbrella. Finally, someone gave him one.

Here is the live video feed from CNN for about the last half hour:

I’d like to get you a shot of the video they are shooting. But it doesn’t seem to be coming back up. When they are on the air they have no sound. The CNN reporter clearly looks uncomfortable with her stylish raincoat and perfectly done hair.

Tim broadcasts screens of other peoples’ cameras and video cameras. He gives credit to any and all other citizen journalists at the movement.

And then earlier this week we had this:

Associated Press Staff Scolded for Tweeting Too Quickly About OWS Arrests — Daily Intel

Apparently the AP policy is that you can’t scoop the wire on Twitter. If you are an AP employee you can’t put something on Twitter if it hasn’t been put on the wire first.

I have been in the Internet business full time since about 1996. It always seemed to move fast. But I’m here to tell you, the speed of change is faster than I’ve ever seen it. And it just seems to be getting faster.

Take a look at this line graph:

It took Google+ 16 days to reach 10 million users. There has never been a faster adoption rate of any media in the history of humanity. And who knows if it will even stick. People may already be moving on.

This incredible speed of change is potentially leaving the old guard left in the dust.

As all of this goes on I can’t help but think of the American Revolution and the Red Coats.

Here are these guys wearing red, marching in line. They are easy pickings for the Revolutionaries. The Indian-learned fighting tactics of the Revolutionaries were infuriating and also effective against the Red Coats.

It feels the same way with so many forms of powerful organizations:

• Music industry is pissed people are stealing their music.
• Movie industry is pissed people are stealing their movies.
• Colleges refuse to offer education in current technology.
• News organizations enforce protocol no matter what.

The old guard leaders are having an incredibly difficult time with the concept of sharing information, giving away information, trading information. Information appears to want to be free. The old guard hates that.

I recently had a professor tell me that he didn’t want his students talking about his class on Facebook because that’s too much power. They couldn’t be trusted with the information. This wasn’t some nuclear physicist. He was a PR professor.

It’s the hoarding of information that will be the death of these organizations. This is their red coat. If they absolutely refuse to let the information go and be free they will die.

Think about this from the perspective of your business. How much of your business strategy has to do with hoarding information:

• Pricing.
• Your weaknesses.
• Your financial solvency.

It’s the companies that become increasingly transparent and open that will be the companies of the future.