#ttsn is Talk To Someone New

#followfriday is one of the most successful Twitter memes, without question - in many ways, it's become too successful, and sadly, not as effective as perhaps it once was. For most Twitter users, it starts pretty well. It's one of the easiest introductions into the mob mentality that makes Twitter so potentially powerful. They feel a bit of "love" from folks they barely know, grow those all-so-important numbers, blindly forward and retweet, and, perish the thought, some of those recommendations will actually get followed. A couple of weeks later, they'll see the same recommendations for the same people they saw last time, and their own numbers will still swell, but the quality of those followers is seriously on the decline. They might have even met someone who doesn't like Follow Friday. Sacrilege, surely?

Weeding through the spam followers and the recommendations from within my clique has become something of a Follow Friday hangover - what's needed is a hangover cure. Seriously, did you recommend a lot of people? Did you follow a lot of people? But, did you actually interact with any of them? If your most common @ reply starts with "Thanks", my guess is, you didn't. And the people who already follow you, who saw your thanks, to people they already follow anyway - well, you weren't actually adding any value there, either.

@Azlen came up with an idea of beating the Follow Friday hangover. How about following #followfriday with #talktosomeonenewsaturday? Purposely going out of your way and start up a conversation with a new follower adds value, certainly - reinstating the social element in why you'd like to find new people in the first place. It certainly seems a good idea - the only objection to it is, of course, that's one monster of a hashtag. A few iterations and a few attempts at getting a shorter one looked promising, but it still wasn't all that snappy. How, precisely, do you go about getting a new hashtag or Twitter meme kickstarted, in any case? The only way to do it is to engage active people with something that's catchy straight away, so you can be sure it'll pass on.

Hence, #ttsn. Talk To Someone New. Short and snappy, and here's a few ways it could work!

• Tell your friends. Promote the #ttsn tag! Get active people to pass the idea along.
• Talk To Someone New. Start a conversation with someone and include #ttsn in your first message. Much better than "What's a nice girl/guy like you doing in a place like this?" :-)
• Promote it in tweets. Trending topics has become a bit of a sad joke lately. it shouldn't take too much tweeting and RT's to get it up there.
• Ask for a conversation. If the idea takes off, maybe you could invite a conversation by tweeting that you're 'looking to #ttsn'

And, maybe this isn't something that needs to be just Saturday, either!

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