If you follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed a lot of posts tagged with #career lately.  No, I haven’t suddenly become an expert on careers (far from it really) – I’m twintering for Careerealism.  Founded by J.T. O’Donnell, Careerealism is a blog/discussion forum focused on offering advice concerning the shifting concept of “career.”  I first came across Careerealism as my graduation was approaching, and I started searching Twitter for career advice.  Careerealism runs a “Twitter Advice Project” that lets a number of career experts answers reader’s questions via Twitter, so that was something I quickly stumbled across.  And as I followed Careerealism’s tweets, I noticed that they were looking for twinterns.

Now I do have a day job.  I’m not going to talk about it here (ever), but as I was thinking about what I wanted to do after graduation, I decided to go ahead and apply for this internship with Careeralism, because, well, why not?  It’s not really something I’d ever done before, and since I am pretty interested in social media, it’s right up my alley.

So what do I do as a twintern?  I tweet.  The whole idea is to help grow Careerealism’s brand awareness and to spread links to and articles on the site.  It’s marketing on Twitter.  J.T. has really embraced social media with the entire program, including in how she communicates with us – meetings occur via Justin.tv and a private Ning network, where we discuss what we’ll be tweeting about during the week, how we’ll be increasing the brand awareness of Careerealism, and also career advice (it wouldn’t be a website about careers if we didn’t).

The twinternship is a ten week program, and we’re about half way through at the moment.  It’s actually quite an interesting experience, because while I’ve been using Twitter for over a year now, it’s always been as an individual.  Tweeting for a brand is…..different.  I’ve already written a bit on how I like to use Twitter, which probably is not how you like to use Twitter (that’s the whole point by the way).  And it’s certainly not how a brand “should” use Twitter.  For example, I started unfollowing people who annoy me recently.  Is that a good thing for a brand?  Probably not, as reciprocity tends to rule the day on Twitter, and as there are a number of services that will follow and unfollow people for you automatically, unfollowing people is a good way to lower your own follower count.  This, of course, is not ideal, so long as we carry traditional advertising metrics like impressions and clickthroughs over to the social media space.  But what if we don’t?  What if we focus instead on the quality of the relationships we build online?

I’d like to thing that building relationships and letting brand awareness and trust build organically is more effective than pushing a brand upon people – I know it is with me.  Then again, I’m not an expert, and I’m pretty new at the whole tweeting for a brand thing (something I hope to write on in greater detail soon).  In the meantime, why don’t you tell me what you think?

Now I’m not arguing with this.  It’s totally accurate at least from my (somewhat limited) experience on Twitter.  But what I find interesting is what happens after this.  I like Twitter for many reasons; one is the fact that I can follow lots of people who write on a variety of subjects.  So one of the first things I did after joining Twitter was to check and see if some of the brands/websites/people I regularly interact with (and/or appreciate) were posting.  I followed them, and some of them followed me back.  But what was interesting was the people who then began to follow me that I wasn’t already following.  I noticed that some of them were in some way related to the people I originally followed.  Here’s an example.  Let’s say I follow a user who works in interactive marketing (one of my primary interests) and they follow me back.  I would then end up with two or three new followers, who more often than wrote on interactive marketing (or whatever the original subject was) .

What did I then do by the way?  Follow them back because they followed me.  Reciprocity in action.

Anyway, my point is that it seems from this perspective as if there are micro-networks on Twitter.  Here’s the steps, to recap:

• I follow Sam, who writes about environmental sustainability.
• Sam then follows me back (reciprocity)
• Jim and Jane (two other users who write about sustainability) then follow me (perhaps they found me by looking at the list of Sam’s followers).
• I then follow Jim and Jane (reciprocity)

If you’ve followed me this far (no pun intended), what this basically means is that mini-networks within Twitter are being created as the Jims and Janes of Twitter look at Sam’s following list to grow their networks.  If we take this to the extreme, we could see a self-reinforcing element arise as users focused on a particular topic just start to follow each other.  The overriding factor here is the nature of Twitter’s users; they’re interested in a diverse set of topics and are likely to jump from one micro-network to the next.  This seems to eliminate any downsides to this phenomenon (which may be entirely in my head, I don’t know) – at least for now.  As to what will happen as Twitter continues to grow and as more and more users discover new ways to use the service, well, your guess is as good as mine (there’s a very good chance it will be better, as I’m operating with only one data set – my own experiences).