For those of you who haven’t heard, today was my first day at 6S Marketing - I think I’ve done a somewhat poor job of keeping this quiet over the past month and a half. This morning I was filled with both excitement and nervousness, but today was amazing - getting to know the people that I’d not met yet at the company and getting settled into the new office (check out my new office set up below, it’s pretty sweet!).

The opportunity that I have at 6S is an amazing step for me in my career. They have brought me on as the Director of Social Media and they’ve tasked me with building a social media department within the company and creating strategic relationships with other Vancouver technology firms. I think that this is a great fit for me, as they’ve done an amazing job over the past few years of building one of the most well known and respected Internet Marketing companies in Vancouver and Canada.

Over the past year particularly, I have really started to take notice of 6S with the steps they’ve taken within the Vancouver technology and social media scene.  As many of you know, they have really stepped up to the plate with participating in, learning about, and sponsoring events. Recently, 6S has become a sponsor for WordCamp Whistler, Northern Voice - which I am on the organizing committee of and will be speaking at, and Twestival. This demonstration of interest in and desire to help through their sponsorship of events - these great events really aren’t possible without sponsors - really helped me to solidify my desire for working with this company.

I’ve had the opportunity to meet with many of people who work at 6S over the past month, including spending this past weekend with them in Whistler for WordCamp and have been overwhelmed with how friendly and accepting they have been with both myself and the changes that are happening within the company with the creation of a new Social Media division.  6S has built an great crew and I am proud to say that I am now a part of.

You can expect to hear a lot more things coming from 6S about social media and my involvement with the company, including me joining the organizing committee for Ideas on Tap.

Photo Credit: Rebecca Bollwitt

I’ve been on twitter for quite a while now and I absolutely love it. It’s a great way to learn and keep up with friends, but as twitter grows, so to does the base of people who begin to friend you on the site. With this, I’ve stopped following everyone that adds me back - well I never actually added everyone, but I am far more selective now than I was when I first joined the site. Whenever someone I don’t personally know adds me, I take a peek over at their twitter page and do a quick mental judgment of whether or not I want to add them back. I though I’d share with you my quick mental checklist, so if you’ve added me on twitter and I’ve not added you back, now you know why.

1. Your profile looks like MySpace. For the sweet dear love of god, one MySpace is more than I can take - please reconsider that really flashy busy picture that you’ve got tiled across the background of your MySpace twitter page and your animated flashing GIF (see point 2).
2. You have a flashing animated GIF for your avatar. This is ancillary to #1, visual assaults on my eyes are in no way appreciated or wanted, if you’re page makes me want to jab things into my eyes, I’m going to run away as fast as humanly possible. Thankfully, I’m only following a couple of people who have done this and only because I was following them prior to twitter allowing people to use these and everytime I see their avatar, I start to reconsider it.
3. You have no avatar. This is a social networking site, be social and share a bit of yourself.  It’s not a dating site and you don’t have to worry about the person sitting next to you at work seeing you on the site - and even if it was a dating site, your buddy was on the dating site as well, so open up a bit - I promise no one is going to laugh at you:)
4. You follow way more people that follow you back - this goes doubly so for accounts with almost no tweets. If you’ve got 100 followers, but you’re following 2,500 people and you’ve only got 5 tweets, sorry I’m moving on.
5. You only promote your own links without adding anything else back to the community. Twitter is a two way communication tool, not a platform to send out one way broadcasts - this only works if you’re the New York Times and trust me, you aren’t. We all promote our own posts on twitter, but if that’s all you do, no one is going to want to listen to you - you are pure noise.
6. You’re a one way tweeter. ie/ you have no @’s in your twitter stream. The brilliance of twitter is the two way nature of the platform, learning and communicating with others that you find interesting. Please reference my previous point.
7. You mention going to the bathroom anywhere in your twitter stream - I’m looking at you Ehsan on this one:) You’re lucky I know you IRL.
8. You’ve got protected tweets. Unless I personally know who you are, I am not going to follow anyone with protected tweets. I figure the only reason to protect your tweets is to limit your tweets to personal friends, hence the lack of follow back.
9. You never shut up. Yes twitter is a communications platform, but I don’t want my entire twitterfeed to be dedicated to your ramblings. This is a pretty subjective one, but if you put out more than about 15 tweets (excluding repies) a day, they’ve got to be pretty damn good and insightful for me to add you.
10. You’re twitter profile is a dead end with no bio info. Tell me a bit about yourself, why do I want to listen to you?

I’m sure I’ve missed a ton and will most likely update the list as new pet peeves come to me. I’d love to hear what bugs you the most on twitter and what makes you not want to follow people.