"I thought it was a fine post, but hardly one of my best," he says. "In fact, I gave it a bit less attention than usual since it was authored in the midst of a week where my family was dealing with a loss. I found a couple of things interesting in the reaction to my suggestions. The first was how much disagreement there was about my recommendation that Twitterers avoid public tweets to thank others for retweets or #followfriday mentions. To me, thanking someone for complimenting you isn't as genuine as a private expression of gratitude; moreover, doing so is a way of promoting oneself as much as it is a way of thanking another person."
In real life, Augie is Managing Director of Experiential Marketing at Fullhouse in Milwaukee and proprietor of a very popular marketing blog called Experience: the Blog.
The enormous reaction to Augie's post began shortly after we make it a Top Story and our link was picked up by Smart Brief on Social Media . The snowball kept on rolling down the hill, getting bigger and bigger. Augie says he is grateful for all the comments and feedback but suggests that Twitterers not lose sight of one key thing: "As Twitter grows and follower lists get longer, the need to filter noise and find the tweets that are most relevant only grows. Habits like publicly tweeting thanks for RTs may be of interest to the person sending and receiving the thanks, but really has no value to the rest of one's follower list. Everyone gets to set their own guidelines and rules for Social Media participation, but I think it is pretty evident that Twitterers who remove noise from their Twitter feeds will be the ones who earn the most attention and respect from others.
"That was the second thing I found of interest--many people mentioned that I was writing about Twitter etiquette, but I wasn't--I wouldn't presume to tell others about manners in Social Media! Instead, I was trying to raise awareness of the things we may do that inadvertently cause others to begin to tune out. Unless a person's goal on Twitter is purely personal, they should care about and be aware of the attention they are earning in squandering."
A final piece of advice: "Everyone's busy and it's easy to get overwhelmed in Social Media, so it's important we consider our tweets not from our own perspective ('I want to tweet this') but from others' (People will find this interesting and will appreciate that I tweeted this.')"