Follow Friday view from Tweet Deck

Every Friday, Twitter users offer hundreds of new suggestions on who to follow as part of recently started ritual known as #followfriday.  For those unfamiliar with it, #followfriday is a way to suggest your favorite tweeters to others by using the hastag #followfriday.

Participating in #followfriday is simple.  When Friday comes create a tweet of the individuals you recommend, include the hashtag #followfriday, and send it off.  There are several examples in the screenshot on the right.

I’ve tracked and participated in the #followfriday trend since it began in mid-January and it has been amazing to watch the movement grow.  Micah Baldwin, #followfriday’s originator, has a great post on Mashable that describes the anatomy of the follow Friday trend if you are interested in learning more about it.  From his post, Micah believes it is successful for three reasons:

1. It’s easy. It takes little effort to send a tweet, something people do dozens of times a day.

2. It’s participatory. You don’t need to be part of the “Twitterati” to participate. You can suggest one person or 100 people. You can get endorsements from one person or a hundred people.

3. It’s karmic and it feels good. It’s a great feeling to simply say, “I think this person is great. You should follow them.”

One of the only downsides of #followfriday is while you can get great suggestions on people to follow, you don’t always get reasons why they are interesting people to follow.  In other words, people who are interesting to one person may not be interesting to others.  Because of this you may begin following a bunch of new people on Friday that you end up dropping before the weekend is over. Also, many suggested tweeters are among the twitter elite that most users follow anyway, like Chirs Brogan, Jeremiah Owyang, or Guy Kawasaki. While they are all great to follow and I can’t recommend them enough, I personally enjoy finding people without large followings who have equally cool and interesting insights to share.

To that end, I wanted expand on my typical #followfriday post by providing a list of individuals who you may not know, but you should consider following.  All the individuals I selected have less than 1000 followers and they are all people who I enjoy reading and chatting with on Twitter.

1. Chris Selland (a.k.a. @cselland):
   Chris and I first met when he was running Reservoir Partners and I got to know him better while he was the lead CRM analyst at Aberdeen.  Lately, it seems, we are running into each other all the time at tweet-ups and other networking events.   I enjoy reading Chris because he combines business, news and personal tweets in a way that isn’t overwhelming.  His opinions are great and he doesn’t mind being controversial.  He has great insight on marketing, CRM and sales that he frequently shares.  The only downside to following Chris is he is a Mets fan, which will be tough on any Red Sox fans during baseball season.
   
   
2. John Stone (a.k.a. @jcstone3):
   John is currently the Sr VP at CrossTech Partners and we first met last year while I was helping out with the New Marketing Summit.  He has a great blog called Revenue Architects that is all about integrating sales and marketing.  What I like most about John is his background as a sales and marketing consultant working in big companies like IBM gives him a very methodical and analytical perspective on how to tie sales and marketing closer together.  I have used a lot of his tips and tricks to help improve my overall marketing and sales strategy.
   
   
3. David Carter (a.k.a. @dkrcarter):
   I have only known Dave for a few months, but have already learned a ton from him.  In the spirit of true transparency, Dave is co-founder of Awareness, where I run marketing and sales.  He’s a former Microsoft guy (please, don’t hold that against him) and is a great evangelist for social media marketing.  The cool thing about Dave is his ideas are almost always “outside the box” which is great for any marketers looking to get a new perspective on how to improve your programs.
   
   
4. Sarah Hamilton (a.k.a. @bostonsarah):
   Don’t be fooled by the Twitter alias, Sarah and I are not related (although we have been asked that in the past). We went to grad school together and received MBA’s from Bentley University in 2001.  Sarah is very passionate about marketing and has a great perspective on how to use social media as part of the marketing mix.  Her blog is called Word Up on Marketing and she is a frequent contributor of interesting marketing related links and articles.
   
   
5. Brian Carroll (a.k.a @brianjcarroll):
   For a marketer, it all “starts with a lead“, right?  Brian’s blog www.startswithalead.com is a great resource for anyone looking to bridge the gap between sales and marketing.  He has great advice on how to uncover qualified sales leads and how to nurture leads who aren’t quite ready to buy.  I first met Brian a few years back when we did a webinar for the BMA together.  Since then I have been a huge fan of his blog and Twitter content.

What do you think?  Anyone I missed that you would like to recommend?