For a few weeks now, Mack Collier, author of one of my favorite marketing blogs, The Viral Garden, has been hosting a “chat” on Twitter using the hashtag #blogchat.

My favorite way to follow the conversation is to use TweetChat, a tool developed by Brooks Bennett. TweetChat turns a hashtag into a chat room, separating out and displaying all the tweets with the hashtag for a particular “room.” TweetChat auto-refreshes, and you can also post directly from TweetChat; the app will automatically append the hashtag for you.

In addition, Brooks has enabled a print format so you can save a transcript of the chat session. It’s a fast-moving conversation, so the transcripts are lengthy (71 pages for a 2-hour period tonight). But there is a wealth of information if you care to dig it out.

Mack kicked off the session with a question about how to measure the effectiveness of your blog.

Blogchat: Sunday nights from 9:00 to 11:00 p.m. EDT

Download this week’s transcript: Blogchat 04-26-09.pdf

Note: remember that, like Twitter, the transcript prints in reverse chronological order. Scroll to the end to find the beginning of the chat.

As a member of UpTake‘s Marketing Board, I wrote an UpTake Travel Industry blog post on the advantages of getting information about your product or service (not necessarily just tourism-related ones, either) into the hands of travelers who use social media tools….

Smart marketing with giveaways 2.0

In it, I describe and link to some of the online reactions (particularly on Twitter) of people who got a travel-related gift/giveaway swag bag during my South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) travel blogging panel with fellow writer Pam Mandel.

Every link in the post is one more effort to land a roundhouse punch against “there’s not enough ROI (Return on Investment) in social media marketing.”

For example:

• “Many liked the sample pralines from local Austin company Lammes Candies – traveler CouchSurfingOri talked about the Lammes habanero praline, and so did hedge fund talent recruiter Kim Haynes and Download Squad tech writer CJClark.
• Krista Parry (Park City, Utah resorts PR and marketing) cheered the stickers provided by the Alltop.com Travel topic channel.
• Canadian travel internet marketing guru Todd Lucier was ready to cash in his bag’s Blue Bell Ice Cream free pint certificate, and he told his friends about it.”

I’d love to hear your comments on the post; thanks!

For the past several months Friday has been a popular day for recommending people to add as new followers on Twitter. The idea was the brainchild of Micah Baldwin, and you can read the origins of Follow Friday on Mashable.

Unforunately, like many Twitter memes, what started as a good idea has devolved into a meaningless popularity contest or numbers game. Far too many people just post a long string of names and add the designated hashtag, #followfriday.

If you’re like me, that tactic is completely ineffective. I skip right over a list of names without reading them. In fact, a couple of people have taken it to such extremes–a dozen or so list-only #followfriday tweets in a row–they merited an unfollow. Hey, it’s not about listing all of your followers for fear you’ll leave someone out; I could copy your whole list if I wanted to.

Last week I posed this question:

A number of people agreed with my dislike of follow lists and retweeted my question. Only one person disagreed with me:

But no matter how much I trust you, I’m not going to follow a list of people you recommend unless I know why you recommend them. Here are a few suggestions for making the most out of Follow Friday.

1. Recommend only one or two people per tweet, and say why you follow them. In effect, you are marketing your friends to me. Why would I want to follow them? It’s not just because you like them. Tell me the value they provide that you think would also be meaningful to me.

2. Recommend several people at once, grouped by category, i.e. people who work for or write about non-profits or food; people who are hockey fans; people who share a hobby like knitting; or people who live in a certain city.

3. Even if you follow suggestions 1 and 2, don’t go overboard and think you have to recommend all your friends this week. There’s always next Friday.

Below are my recent Follow Friday recommendations:

Very talented on keyboards/vocals: @DietrichSchmidt w/ @TheArsSupernova. Has MBA, works for Deloitte; but music his passion. #followfriday

Gifted artists who also write: @susanreynolds and @mousewords. Another artist whose work I admire is Stephen Harlow, @p0ps. #followfriday

For inspiration and powerful writing in simple words, @jnswanson. Also a man of faith and integrity. #followfriday

Would be professional singers if they could make a living at it: @kamihuyse and @lauriereece. Both have gorgeous voices. #followfriday

I have enjoyed tag-teaming presentations w/ both @SheilaS and @epodcaster. Fun when you work well w/ people. 2 smart women for #followfriday

#followfriday @MuthaMae for giggles, drama, adventure w/ toddlers in tow. Yes, a midwestern housewife can be a video star! Bonus: pink boa

#followfriday @Dayngr is friendly, reaches out to newbies. She also tweets as @MailOurMilitary, a great nonprofit. Check them out.

#followfriday For one-liners that actually make you LOL @badbanana http://bit.ly/hHZCD

I’ve never been in the camp of those who follow back every one who adds them on social networks. While the reason people reciprocate all follows–it does seem the polite thing to do–is understandable, I know I’ll never be able to have any kind of meaningful interaction with all of them (over 6,000 now on Twitter). So to me, it seems the more courteous thing to do is not to follow everyone back, but to make sure I respond to anyone who sends an @ message to me.

My question in this blog post is to ask how you determine your “friending” policy on social networks, especially Twitter.

Yesterday I started a TwtPoll to ask the question. Of course, this is not a scientific survey, and is only a small sample of people–83 people who follow me on Twitter or who follow someone who kindly retweeted the poll for me. And the number 1,000 is an arbitrary threshold.

The results, frankly, surprised me a bit. I thought there might be more who valued reciprocity so highly they would unfollow someone who doesn’t follow them back. That is certainly the gambit of those trying to amass followers as quickly as possible, since Twitter seems to limit a person to following 2,000 people or 110 percent of those who follow them, whichever is higher.

But the vast majority of respondents indicated that it either didn’t matter whether I follow them back (46%) or that it was fine as long as I made an effort to respond to messages directed to me (42%). As Dave Shaw said, “Following is the ultimate opt-in and doesn’t require a follow back. Nice but not required. Responding to @’s and DM’s is just good manners.” (Please click through to the poll to read all the comments.)

As a result of the poll, I will be trimming back the number of people I follow on Twitter. If I can’t remember having any exchanges with someone, I’ll drop that person. Why? Because I’m following over 1,200 people but only paying attention to a few hundred at most.

And that meshes with the well-known Dunbar number, an estimation of the number of people with which one can realistically maintain relationships. For “real-life” friends, the average number is 150, with some people able to keep track of around 300.

I share Ross Mayfield’s view that social software allows us to augment the Dunbar number, which he based on the size of the neocortex in primates and then extrapolated to humans. Ross cites recent research that shows:

Twitter users have a very small number of friends compared to the number of followers and followees they declare. This implies the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of actual friends. The latter proves to be a more influential network in driving Twitter usage.

That describes my experience. When I was using Twitter exclusively on the Web, I was easily following 500 people. Using tools like Twhirl and TweetDeck, I began to follow more people. TweetDeck gives the illusion of following 1,200+ people. But in reality, I ignore most of them. As the research shows, I have a group of “top friends” I keep in contact with by using the Group feature in TweetDeck. And the rest I try to read now and then–but that turns out to be so infrequently that those other people might as well not be on my “following” list.

This topic has been on my mind since attending a salon discussion at South by Southwest Interactive led by David Armano and Russ Unger. Summarizing his thoughts about the Friendship Is Dead conversation and the concept of ambient intimacy on his Logic + Emotion blog, David concluded:

Most of us intuitively know who our friends are. … But, with networks we have access to more individuals then ever before in history. We know when they are sick, when they are traveling and even when they’ve lost a loved one. Some of us stay in constant communication with people who would have normally been considered “loose ties”, people we’ve met at an event, a party, a former co-worker, or college friend. These ties can become strengthened and feel like something more than they used to be.

What are your thoughts on the relevance of the Dunbar number to social networks and the proper etiquette for following people on Twitter?