My FriendFeed buddy Robert Scoble announced last night, that he was going to unfollow around 105,000 people on Twitter.  He has his reasons for doing this, most of which are valid in my opinion.

Robert also publicly said (very generously) that he now realises he was wrong, when he said that I should not have reset my Twitter account way back in January. That meant a lot to me, as Robert’s one of the brightest people I know, and I value his opinions a great deal.

Robert’s decision comes after other well-known Twitter users unfollowed their followers too, including; Loic Le Meur, Jason Calacanis and Natali Del Conte. By the way, all of these people simply unfollowed their followers. I completely reset my account – zero followers / zero following – and started again from scratch.

But Jim – Everyone’ says you should blindly follow on Twitter!

I reset my Twitter account because of the time it took me to deal with all the spam and ‘noise’, that came from following everyone back, when I was the 3rd most followed person in England.  Back then, almost everyone, including a man I really respect Guy Kawasaki, was telling people that the ‘right’ way to use Twitter, was to follow everyone who follows you. I disagreed with Guy and with ‘the crowd’ on this.

I believed then, as I do now, that different people should use their Twitter accounts in different ways, based on what they want to achieve.  In fact, if you have the same business model as Guy, following everyone who follows you might be the right thing to do.

But here’s the challenge

It might not be the right thing for you to do: Just because ‘the crowd’ are all taking one piece of advice, does not make it automatically the best advice for you or the right thing for you to do. I am not talking about Twitter here, I’m talking about the commercial importance of having faith in your own judgement.

Never be afraid to stand out from the crowd

If you know your subject, have done your research and you truly believe that you are right, do it!