Derek Draper has been building up a large following on Twitter for Labour List, by following all the followers of other bloggers. It happened to Iain Dale, and yesterday I started getting reports that it is happening to me.

There are all sorts of wonderful Twitter related services that people who just dive in sometimes don’t know about, which do things like graph of the growth of your followers. Geeks are good that way. Here’s @derekdraper compared with @iaindale:

You can see the lunge when they said “Right boys, let’s do Twitter now“.

That looks a little “non-organic”, and perhaps even slightly “forced”. This happened on February 6th, and Derek systematically went through all Iain Dale’s followers and followed them. In one way that is fine, since twitter is still a promiscuous medium where people follow you back when you follow them – but it also seems contrived as if DD is the Man from Delmonte and we must all go YES !!!.

Derek has now done the same with me, and he’s welcome to follow all my followers – who are quite capable of looking after themselves, although the Sheep (@ben_gallagher) was rather shocked and has gone into hiding, and I hope he doesn’t swear at the Bishop (@alantlwilson) by mistake.

Playing with our Dolly

The current figures for @derekdraper are following 2035, and being followed by 1905.

Now, the rules of Twitter change at “following 2,000″ and that means we can have some fun. It’s easy, too.

The way Twitter works when you hit 2000 is that you can only follow an extra 10% on top of the people who have followed you back. This is why people with large followings usually have a balance between the two figures.

What to do

So if a lot of us unfollow Dolly that will therefore bring the aggressive growth strategy to a dead stop – or at least until he has unfollowed us in return and found another few hundred more amenable people to grow the Labour List Twitter empire.

PR 1.0 should be history

I’m seeing this all as part of a process of education for Mr D that conversational politics is not about great lunges for growth as if you were some sort of cosmic Musketeer, and an education for the New Labour online strategists that the Whelan-Campbell PR-bludgeon strategy is best left in the dustbin of history.

We’ll get them there yet.

Wrapping Up

I sure hope that UNITE or whoever is funding those interns has RSI insurance in place and pays overtime.

If you want to continue following the Labourlist Twitter Feed after unfollowing Dolly, you can do it by reading the RSS feed for @derekdraper.