Holy Kaw folks – Guy Kawasaki lays it out in plain English how he posts, tweets, and makes ad revenue on his Posterous blog.
Here's a sample of what the great evangelist says:
General
Question: How can you follow so many people?
Answer: I don’t read the timelines of all the people that I follow. Instead, I only deal with @s, Directs, and tweets that contain “guykawasaki” and “alltop.” I am not reading everything everyone I follow tweets, but I answer almost every @ and Direct.
Question: Then why do you follow everyone?
Answer: I follow everyone for two reasons: first, common courtesy; second, so that anyone can send a Direct to me. I like Direct messages because they are so much more efficient than email.
Ghostwriters
Question: Do you use ghostwriters?
Answer: Yes, four people contribute to my tweets: Annie Colbert, Gina Ruiz, Noelle Chun, and Neenz Faleafine. This is why you will see the initials “AC, “GR,” “NC,” and “LF” at the end of some tweets. If there are no initials, then it’s me or the automated feeds.
I use ghostwriters because I want to provide as many interesting links as possible, and five intelligent people looking for interesting stuff are bound to find more than one. Incidentally, I measure the quality of my links (and that’s what matters most to me) by how many times people retweet me. One objective measure of retweets is Retweetrank.
Update: There are now six ghosts to find and write Holy Kaw stories: Noelle Chun, Will Mayall, Catherine Faas, Annie Colbert, Neenz Faleafine, and Paul David Shrader. In addition, seven organizations can post Holy Kaw stories too: HowStuffWorks.com, Futurity, Toxel, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Answers.com, National Geographic, and BBC.
The three sites that I now check to see how I’m doing are: TwitterGrader, Twittercounter, and Klout.
Question: Why do you constantly promote Alltop?
Answer: Twitter is a broadcast marketing tool. This is why I put so much time, energy, and money (my ghosts don’t work for free) into it. The Alltop “advertising” justifies and pays for my tweeting—you can think of my tweets as PBS content and the accompanying Alltop promotion as the fundraising telethon.
Update: no change. By the way, Alltop traffic has increased 200% in the past year.
Question: Okay, but what if I don’t want to see Alltop promotions?
Answer: You can UFM (unfollow me).
Update: no change. The economic and philosophical model remains: we find good stuff, we ask that you “pay” us for this effort with a page view. If you can find good stuff without us and think that our “fee” is too high, UFM and have a happy rest of your life.
People this is pure gold ! For the rest of Guy's analysis check out his full blog post here.
Follow Guy on Twitter @GuyKawasaki
[image via Flickr]
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