Following encourages following

It sounds like something the King of the Sheep would say doesn’t it? But following really does encourage following. I’d like to welcome Lolren Lollipop on board the good ship Newsdesk as my latest excellent follower.

As regular readers will know, or readers who read the last post anyway, I decided that I would use a highly disingenuous method of attracting more followers. Until now, I have grown additional followers purely organically, that’s to say I didn’t really seek out followers, they found me. However, as a lot of farmers have discovered, going organic is not necessarily that healthy for the old profit margins. It might sound nice, but in truth maybe Mother Nature really does sometimes need a helping hand. Ipso facto, so does this blog.

I’ve noticed, along with Mr Coleman, that on Twitter, I have a massively high number of followers compared with here on the blog. I also noticed that when people follow me on Twitter, I will follow them right back and as I get more followers so more join and so on and so forth, it’s a self-perpetuating upward helter-skelter of followization. Though, my Twitter Tweets are effectively just small bite size chunks of the blog posts, so you’d think the blog would be more popular, right?

So by applying the same Twitter-based growth strategy logic to this blog, I should be able to cause an upward helter-skelter of followization. I call this new social media theory – Barry’s Theory of Following, or Sheep Syndrome. I haven’t quite decided what to call it as it goes. BTF (Barry’s Theory of Followization) is a catchy abbreviation by is possibly too self-explanatory while Sheep Syndrome is not only clever piece of anthropomorphic observation but also a nice piece of alliteration. However, it suffers as an abbreviation.

Anyhoo, I followed a whole bunch of cool looking blogs and guess what?! Yep, one of those cool bloggers followed me right back pushing me back up to 12 followers!

Can I can a woop-woop?

Cool beans. Lolren’s blog, C'Est La Vie, Mon Cheri, has 15 followers (including yours truly) and is all about make-up. I can’t say I’ve ever worn the stuff, It’s funny isn’t it readers, if I put make-up on I’d probably look like some sort of freaky transvestite, but when Gill puts her face on, she actually looks more feminine than without.

Anyway, I guess I’ll sit tight and see if any of the other cool bloggers come on board. If they don’t, I guess I’ll ditch-em and follow a few others for a while. Does that make me a shallow man, transparently trying impress upon the world that I’m important virtually to make up for inadequacies in the real world or does it make me, like so many of my Twitter followers claim to be, a master of social media, able to engage with the web-based influencers, using subtle viral guerrilla marketing techniques?

It’s something to chew over for a while eh?

Champions league final tomorrow, so I doubt I’ll post.

Newsdesk prediction: Man Utd 3-2 Barcelona.