What Andrew Baron Should Be Selling: Following

13 Apr 2008 in Twitter by Garrick

There’s lots of chatter today about Andrew Baron auctioning off his 1500 Twitter followers.

As of this writing, the auction is just over $500.

Standard ad-based media play: aggregate eyeballs and sell them off to the highest bidder.

Yummmm. Eyeballs.

“This stunt may spark some copycatters, but it is essentially meaningless.” – Stowe Boyd

I suspect I’m not the only one that unfollowed prior to the outcome, not because of the auction specifically, I just didn’t enjoy his messages and this development was a fine enough reason to dump him. :p

That’s what made me think Andrew is selling the wrong asset. He can only sell his followers once. What he should be doing is auctioning off his ‘following’, the people he’s paying attention to.

“Will the new Andrew Baron, unlike the old one, follow me?” – Stephen Baker, Business Week

Andrew is the advertisement anyway.

This has a couple benefits for Andrew that his current stunt doesn’t:

1. It’s an ongoing revenue stream. If someone wants Andrew to pay attention to them, this makes it real easy, pay him.
2. It puts a dollar figure on attention. I suspect Steve Gillmor would love that
3. It reduces Andrew’s information overload.

Elsewhere:

“There’s nothing wrong with stunt income, but it can only work once at best.” – Ewan Spence

“Don’t care, don’t believe it proves anything one way or the other except this: It proves the shallowness of at least a few folks who actually care to waste $1500+ dollars on something that means exactly nothing.” – Karoli

And to lighten things up a bit:

…I also participate in another telephone number over on my cell phone so I’m thinking I’ll start taking more calls over there and start up a new phone to do what I want to do next…. – Alexander Muse

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