Looking to Increase Twitter Following with a Contest

(Note: My regular posting for February 22, 2009 is below. If you’ve already read about the contest, you can just jump to it here.)

As someone who focuses on the future professionally, one might accuse me of missing the bus and not being more hip to Twitter sooner than I was. (I didn’t begin Twittering until January 2009.) I plead guilty to the charge and will offer no lame excuses.

After Twittering for a month and then reading this illuminating piece in Techcrunch, the business and social value of Twitter has become clearer to me. Therefore, in an effort to make up for lost time and increase my number of followers, I have decided to heed my own advice on the value of prizes as well as that of uber-Twitter Kevin Rose’s on the wisdom of starting a contest as a method of increasing one’s followers. (See tactic #7)

More specifically, I have decided to offer a new Amazon Kindle 2 to a randomly selected follower once I attain 5000 followers. There is nothing inherently magical about 5000 followers, I just felt it was an ambitious yet attainable goal.

If you are reading this posting for the first time, I would greatly appreciate it if you would tweet this offer to your followers. If you have stumbled across this post due to Twitter, I’d sincerely appreciate it if you would consider retweeting it. Don’t know what either Twitter or a retweet is? Just click on the associated link.

The reason I have chosen a Kindle as the prize is because it is symbolic of the work I do as a business/technology forecaster and public speaker—in that I help organizations discern (or “read”) the future. All of my tweets are geared toward this end. Thus, if you have even the slightest interest in the future—and I sincerely hope you do because it is, after all, where all of us will spend our remaining time on this planet—I’m confident you’ll find value in following me. Also, I’m happy to follow you back—especially if you’ve got some interesting, informative, innovative, insightful or just plain entertaining to say.

To ensure that I really do offer a new Kindle, I will conduct a live drawing on LiveCast and announce the winner’s name and then later post the recording of the event to my YouTube account. (Note: In the interest of fairness, my current followers will also be eligible to win as it wouldn’t be fair to unnecessarily penalize them just because they began following me early.)

P.S. To the regular readers of Jump the Curve, between now and April 15, 2009, I will be working on updating the 2009 version of my book, Green Investing: A Guide to Making Money through Environment-Friendly Stocks. As a result, I won’t have as much time to devote to my regular blog. To keep your attention, however, I will be publishing the entire version of Jump the Curve: 50 Essential Strategies to Help Your Company Stay Ahead Emerging Technologies online at this site. Each day you can expect at least one new “strategy.” I also invite readers to continue to follow my daily (and hourly) thoughts on the future at twitter.com/jumpthecurve and/or subscribe to my free monthly newsletter, The Exponential Executive.)