The Fearless Blogger

Alister Cameron is currently running a contest called The Hunt for the Coolest Twitter Background. As soon as I read about it, I was immediately a fan of the idea.   I asked Alister (via Twitter) what inspired him to run the contest and his response was:

I was inspired by the desire to acknowledge people who’ve found ways to make their Twitter page background/colour look great. Also that, to my knowledge, no one has paid attention to twitter page design, period. And I wanted to! Finally… more on this later, I am using my competition to prove a point about strategic use of twitter.

Back to why I am such a fan of the contest . . .

First, as someone who likes to obsess on customization, I’m all for recognizing folks who have put effort into designing unique – er cool – Twitter backgrounds (so far @problogger and@rozsavage seem to be in the lead).   There are a couple of sites that offer resources and suggestions for customizing your Twitter background, but it’s not an area that’s received a relatively large amount of attention.  Granted Twitter doesn’t allow as much customization as MySpace or even Facebook, but that’s part of what makes this contest so very – um – cool.

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The second reason may not be directly connected with the contest’s intent, but something I believe could be a meaningful by-product.  Let me explain . . .

After the first day, there were only about 100 nominees.  Given that Alister has close to 1,500 followers and the viral nature of the Twitterverse, I thought this number was surprising low.

On second thought, I realized most people on Twitter are either using a third party Twitter application to read and respond to tweets or don’t really stray from their own “home” page in Twitter during their daily Twitter activity.

In other words, many folks don’t see anything beyond a person’s avatar and tweet content - they may be interacting with others on Twitter without ever visiting that person’s profile page (something I am guilty of as well).

After reading Amber Naslund’s “Thanks For Following, Now Click On My Junk“, I disabled my auto-reply and I made it my mission to get to know every new follower I’d gained.   It took all night, but by the end of it I felt instead of my “followers” being just a number, I knew who the people behind them were.  I made some connections I’d go so far as to describe as meaningful.

I love that Alister has given us a reason to look beyond the avatars. This contest is the perfect excuse to pay a visit to some of your followers’ profiles.

Your mission, should you choose to accept: Visit at least one follower’s profile page a day. Read their “about”, click on their outbound link.  See if you can get a sense of the person behind the tweets.

In other words, the second reason I’m a fan of this contest is that it’s an opportunity for each of us to make a connection.

Will you?

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picture credits: Wordle licensed as

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