I know you don’t do this, but you probably know someone who does: obsesses about their Twitter follower count. Or Feedburner subscriber count. Or LinkedIn contact count.
And yeah, the raw number’s interesting for about three or four seconds. But it says nothing about how you engage with those people (assuming they’re people, and not bots – which can be a big assumption), or how they engage with you.
It’s way too easy to chase numbers without paying attention to what we actually want to accomplish, whether it’s sales conversions, social change, human connection or – as Meg Fowler puts it – making up for what happened in high school.
That said, having just discovered I’ve lost three followers in the last half-hour, I have to go wail alone in the closet.
