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Brogan
Chris Brogan confounded me last week.
The man, considered by many to be a social media visionary, seemed to be contradicting himself.
Brogan preaches authenticity. Whenever he interviews someone he’s done business for, he discloses it. Whenever he writes about someone who sponsored an event for him, he discloses it.
Through the course of Brogan’s writing, he’s also disclosed his disdain for Twitter robots. These are the automated services. They can be programmed to send specific messages or they can be used to follow people who follow you. It’s a reciprocal thing.
This is where I got confused. I knew Brogan hated robots, but I learned (after I saw him following some spam accounts) that he uses a robot service to follow people who start following him.
Brogan will break 80,000 followers by the time this gets posted. And Brogan follows nearly everyone who follows him. But I couldn’t understand why he would use a ‘bot when he has been so set against them. So I sent him a message. Here’s his response:
- I hate auto tweets.
- I can’t possibly manually follow back, so I need a robot.
- I CAN manage s***heads and remove them when I notice them.
- NO part of my communication is robotic.
Brogan then sent another message with his mantra: “Mechanize everything that doesn’t touch a human. Humanize everything that does.”
It makes sense. It also got me thinking about whether or not we’re making that human connection wherever possible. It is really not that hard to do. Even if it happens over a data stream.
(Photo from Personal Brilliance Advisors)
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Good stuff.
Props to you Sean for your fine investigatory work and props to Chris for being human. I enjoy seeing this in social media – when it talks, listens, corrects, forgives. And by “it” I mean the people that interact via it of course.