Guy Kawasaki Can Handle Being Called a Spammer

By Andrew LaVallee

To kick off his keynote speech at SES, a marketing conference in New York, Guy Kawasaki asked how many people in the audience were on Twitter at that moment. Hands shot up across the packed ballroom.

“Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of,” he said.

The former Apple marketer and current venture capitalist, book author and Web site operator was there to tell attendees how he uses Twitter and interconnected social-media tools like Twhirl and TweetDeck to generate buzz and monitor what others are saying about him.

An unabashed fanboy when it comes to the service, Mr. Kawasaki called it “the most powerful marketing tool that I’ve seen since probably television.” Toward the end of his talk, he added: “I love Twitter as much as I love Macintosh. And I love Macintosh.”

He also made enough provocative statements to guarantee that he’ll be retweeted — the Twitter equivalent of forwarding an e-mail — all day. One of the first was his advice that to be successful on the site, you need lots of followers. “I believe that Twitter is a numbers game,” he said.

That set off one of the first bursts of responses on Twitter. “Controversial?” asked Jeffrey Rohrs. “Twitter is a numbers game only for those who care about numbers. It is exactly what you make it,” wrote noahwesley.

But retweeting is also crucial, Mr. Kawasaki said. “Retweeting is the sincerest form of flattery,” he said. “When somebody retweets you, they really have made a conscious decision that they like what you’ve done.” He directed the crowd’s attention to Retweetist, which measures how often you’re echoed, and pointed out that he tops the list. “It’s kind of my scorecard,” he said, admitting that he checks it 5 to 10 times a day.

He noted that he employs people who help him find buzzworthy articles and post on his behalf, and shrugged that others might find that practice controversial. “Did you know that @GuyKawasaki has people he pays to tweet for him? I didn’t, but he just owned up to it,” wrotewrote Mike Pantoliano. Lisa Barone. “Not Cool,”

Even though he extolled the importance of followers, he then said that the number is becoming less and less meaningful, pointing out that CNN added 20,000 followers just yesterday.

That’s largely a function of Twitter’s “Suggested Users” box, which comes up after clicking “Find People.” “For the life of me, I cannot figure how you get into this box,” he said, highlighting Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s CTO, on the list. “How is she one of the most important people to follow on Twitter,” he asked, moving on to Ryan Seacrest and Perez Hilton. “What is this world coming to?”

He admitted that some of his tactics, like encouraging followers to re-broadcast another site’s RSS feed, are ethically murky. “If I do it, it’s clever marketing. If it’s done to me, it’s spam,” he said.

His remarks sparked controversy on Twitter. One of the most-retweeted reactions is from Michael Gray, a search-engine-optimization consultant, who wrote “@matt_mcgowan or anybody else ask @guykawasaki if everyone used twitter the way he did would it be ruined.”

Mr. Kawasaki generally has a short response for online detractors, which he might repeat in this case: “UFM,” or “un-follow me.”