The advice from many on Twitter these days seems to boil down to a desperate quest to build a massive following. A tweet this morning promised a way to generate something like 20,000 new followers in a day. Then there are e-books about how someone built a massive following...by writing a book about how to build a massive following--it's ridiculous.

I joined twitter last Spring and slowly accumulated a little over 500 followers. I did not have a grand plan, I just started following interesting people and followed back anyone who appeared human and mildly interesting.

But as I've looked at this in the context of actually making Twitter work for a client, I've become a lot more selective. I believe the ideal place to be on Twitter is to follow and be followed by a group of people who share a common interest but don't already follow each other. In that situation, you can gather enormous amounts of useful information and re-tweet it back to a network of folks who will find it valuable.

It's hard to consistently generate massive amounts of original content. As in blogging, the vast majority of information being published is simply repetition of ideas already published elsewhere. It's not about coming up with a new idea...it's about connecting people to ideas.

Connecting is different from "exposing." Great writing is about telling stories in a way that the underlying ideas literally resonate with your audience. The connection is not simply making a person aware of an idea, it's making them aware of how they relate to the idea. It's infecting them with the passion that inspires you.

On Twitter, you have only 140 characters of text to work with. I'm the kind of person who can sit back and write 2000 words off the top of my head, so Twitter is good discipline for me. Words alone don't suffice.

Connecting actions are what matter. The most influential people are the people who share the most relevant information. They re-tweet each other's posts--posts that link to some other blog or news article they found valuable.

The top spots are already taken. The people who have 50,000 followers quickly sort out into a handful of people who are the Twitter elite and the rest who are using some scheme to get many followers. Trying to compete with Robert Scoble is pointless because numbers alone don't matter.

You have to ask yourself what does matter. At one extreme, if you are running for President of the US, then having 90% of the people on Twitter follow you is a good start...but it's hardly determinative. You need millions to not only be aware of you, but to vote for you. On the other hand, if you have 100 people you follow and who follow you back...and when you ask a question, you get 5 answers right away, that's probably better than having 10,000 random followers who are equally likely to follow you as they are to follow someone's cat.

It's the same thing with blog comments...quality over quantity. I recall one blogger I like was on Yahoo for awhile and every post generated hundreds of often idiotic comments. Meanwhile, her regular blog grew steadily and was interesting because the comments were thoughtful and intelligent. You could see the connection happening between writer and responder. The massive following of idiots on Yahoo was impressive in numbers, but worthless in terms of anything that mattered.

So my strategy for my client is to stake out a niche, to follow people who have something to say that matters in that niche, and engage with them, connecting them to each other and sharing information in that niche that matters to them. We may have 100 followers or 1000. But I'm not going to try to rig some chain letter twitter campaign just to be able to say we have thousands of followers.