The advice from many on Twitter these days seems to boil down to a desperate quest to build a massive following. A tweet this morning promised a way to generate something like 20,000 new followers in a day. Then there are e-books about how someone built a massive following...by writing a book about how to build a massive following--it's ridiculous.

I joined twitter last Spring and slowly accumulated a little over 500 followers. I did not have a grand plan, I just started following interesting people and followed back anyone who appeared human and mildly interesting.

But as I've looked at this in the context of actually making Twitter work for a client, I've become a lot more selective. I believe the ideal place to be on Twitter is to follow and be followed by a group of people who share a common interest but don't already follow each other.