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This semester I’m teaching a course at Emerson College in Boston entitled Social Media and Marketing. If this topic interests you, there are many ways you can participate. The easiest is joining our Facebook fan page, “Why Social Media Matters.” My goal is to contribute to meaningful discourse about the role of social media in our lives and our businesses. Feel free to drop on by and stay for a while. I’m going to blog quite frequently about it as well.

One of the things I love about social media is how simple it can be. Sure, you can make social media complex. You can measure metrics, use social marketing models and chart the growth of communities over time. However, you can also create one powerful idea. An idea that doesn’t require anything but others willing to play along.

Take the idea of Follow Friday for example. Hundreds of thousands participate weekly in nominating their friends to be followed on Twitter. The concept is simple, and the participation is contagious. To play, you just need a Twitter account. What if we applied the concept of Follow Friday to our lives? Maybe we’d call it “Have you met” Tuesdays. And we would share the great people we know with others we cared about.

Why does social media matter to you?

If you work in midtown Manhattan, you’re likely to know the food cart I’m talking about. It’s the one on 53rd and 6th with 30 people waiting in line. They’re waiting to eat middle eastern food sold from a cart the size of a mini-copper. And they wait at all hours. When I passed by at 10 pm at least 50 people were in line. When I asked them if the food was “that good” to merit the line, they responded, “well, I saw the line, so it must be.”

I believe the same psychology of lines applies to Twitter. So often people use following / follower ratio to determine who they want to follow before actually “trying the food.”

There are many ways to cause lines to form, yet far fewer to cook a great meal.

Gennefer Snowfield’s recent blog post “There’s Too Many ‘Me, Me, Me’s in ‘Follow Me” spurred an impacting conversation on who we follow on Twitter and why. More than 30 people commented, and the discussion that started on her blog carried into many twitter conversations. Gennefer emphasized the importance of quality over quantity, complementing the relationship builders and disparaging “friend collectors and wannabe gurus.”

People who wear their friend count like a badge of honor are annoying, and there is no prize for attaining a target number of friends. However, I do not think the situation is so black and white.

I like adding “random,” people on twitter not to increase my friend count but to add to the diversity of my tweet stream. I often use twitter’s search tool to find keywords that suggest people I may want to follow. Recently, I’ve used these keywords and phrases:

• Salman Rushdie
• James Joyce
• CPM
• “Check this out”
• Brazil

I have found that people who uses these keywords are often people I enjoy following. And when I am wrong, I simply unfollow them.
When in doubt, I follow first and unsubscribe later. That method works well for me. Other methods I use are described here.

I have found that my experience of twitter is different with more friends and followers than it was with fewer friends and followers. If I ask a question now, not only do my friends respond—I also receive responses from unexpected people with completely different backgrounds and experiences.

I confess. I’m completely addicted to cool ideas, spectacular links, and fresh insight. Following 100s of people has deeply satisfied my information addiction.

I personally agree that it’s ideal to connect to a network of people whose insights you value. However, I have no problem with people arbitrarily “friending” folks to find those people.

A few weeks ago I posted my criteria for following people back on twitter.

Do check out Gennefer Snowfield’s blog post. The conversation there is spectacular.