If you live in my metro area and aren’t a total idiot/trainwreck/drama queen, I will probably follow you back.

If your Twitter is a well-thought-out collection of interesting thoughts and links from around the web, I will probably follow you back.

If you and I have something major in common (like our career) and you are interesting and articulate, I will probably follow you back.

If you are a published author and have correctly picked up via your Spidey Senses that I would like to read your book, I will definitely follow you back.

Now then.

If you’re a d00d following me because I’m a chyk, no go.

If you have zero entires, 3 followers and I have no idea who the hell you are, sorry! Not following you back.

Just because I wrote something that had @SenJohnMcCain in it doesn’t mean I want to become your new conservative BFF. He’s my Senator and he’s just figuring out The Twitter and thus paying a lot of attention to it, and henceforth listening to people like me.

If you are some kind of Established Important Person and you only use Twitter to promote your book or upcoming seminars or appearances, you are boring. I might follow you anyway. Just saying.

If you are not an Established Important Person but play one on Twitter (you know who you are), that’s just sad. Probably not gonna follow you back.

Last, if you’ve skated through life by being Cute n’ Sexy!, I am so not following you back. Put some clothes on and get a job.

What are your criteria, readers?

Dear mainstream media:

I just figured out what I want out of you.

I want you to do the VERY best reporting that you can do, and then I want Guy Kawasaki to tell me which stories I should be reading because I don’t have time to filter through 500 RSS feeds or your cluttered homepages.

I don’t no longer want you telling me what to read because you do a bad job at guessing. You think I’m into slideshows of user-submitted baby photos and celebrity news – wrong! I have voluntarily given you so many pieces of disparate information on my interests via my profile, which you have ignored in favor of lazy mass-market ads that are getting disturbingly more downscale (Lose 15 pounds via colon cleansers? Really?)

It doesn’t have to be the Guy Kawasaki — he’s already giving me plenty to read via Twitter. But I want you to hire a metaphorical Guy Kawasaki, someone who I follow because I want to live in his world. I read about 80% of the links he posts. If he told me to check out an innovative new product, there’s about a 75 – 90% likelihood I would. Why? Because I trust him and I want to be like him.

Standard online newspapers will rebound when they figure out how to do this locally.

This map of Prop 400 results amuses me. Phoenix and Tempe clearly want light rail. Mesa is an island of No splotches amid a sea of green Yes votes.

So guess which station is the most heavily boarded three months after the light rail opens? Yup. The one Mesa station.

I thought light rail was supposed to fail in our individualistic, don’t-tread-on-me city.

So imagine this. A girl gets pregnant at 15. Has the baby. Her boyfriend takes off. She gets kicked out of the house.

She obviously can’t stay home and take care of the baby, so she sends her away to live with another family and pays for all her expenses. The family keeps making up doctor bills and other excuses to bilk her out of money.

Meanwhile, she’s working like a dog to pay to keep her child alive. In a factory. Her boss wants to have sex with her. She says no. He finds out that she has a baby out of wedlock and is furious. She’s fired.

Nobody will give her a break. The family watching her kid is like, “Your kid is going to die if you don’t send money NOW.” She is running out of options. She sells her jewelry. Then cuts off her hair and sells that. Then she sells her teeth.

Then she has to sell the only thing she has left in the world to sell.

Anyway.

That’s what Susan Boyle’s singing about.

BTW, our heroine gets sick and dies at 23. Victor Hugo probably saw it all the time.

I quit a relationship because I didn’t like how I felt about myself when I was with him. Most of the time, I felt like a fat 12-year-old dork.

And I’ve been dumped for the same reason. He just didn’t like how he felt around me.

It’s funny, though, how for most people, this is a completely unacceptable reason to quit your job. Inadequacy is the norm. Suck it up and work harder. Change yourself, not your scene.

Here’s another way to look at it: The longer you stay in an unhappy relationship, the longer you’re depriving someone else of you. Maybe that someone is a person. Maybe it’s a whole ship full of people, pulling away from the dock…

There’s a PR guy in town who decided to blog about my organization’s recent media flap.

He used a number of ugly words to describe our president and staff, then went on to say that we “fumbled so badly that PR textbooks will cite this as the most high-profile case of institutional arrogance the United States has ever seen.”

Really. The worst case in history, Mom!

I don’t understand how this post helped this guy build credibility as the kind of PR professional you’d want to hire. What’s his hook? Amazing ability to jump on the bandwagon? Bachelor’s degree in sarcasm with a minor in hyperbole?

What’s sad is that he had the opportunity to use his blog to review the situation and offer creative insight. Might’ve made him look like a good problem solver. Maybe the kind of person his readers would want to call up in a crisis.

But he’d rather be  an editorial writer, and we know how much opportunity there is in that.

You’re in sales. I’m a technical decision-maker.

It is a bad, bad time to be dialing for dollars. I get it. You’re hungry. I look like a steak. So here are some free tips for cold-calling us geeks:

1. Don’t cold-call geeks. Email us. We can talk by phone later if we think you’re going to help us. I have done this.

2. Give us some time to answer your email. Unless you are totally irrelevant to our business it is likely that we are doing our homework, checking out your website and talking to other people about you. You have a set of probing questions to ask and we want to give correct answers, saving us both time. Which leads us to a really imortant point:

3. Geeks pretty universally HATE aggression. If you are too pushy or needy, we will probably not want to have a relationship with you.

4. Bad: “Can I please have a half hour of your time to talk to you about how cool we are?” Good: “Hello! Have you heard of us? Your peers at X, Y and Z are using our solution, may I do a quick demonstration?” I know, homework. Frowny face.

5. Please do not show me a website you made in 1998.

6. If we’re calling India, let’s say we’re calling India and not demean the second-largest country in the world by pretending we’re calling New York.

7. Can we not chit-chat on the phone every month just so we can keep you top-of-mind? Last thing I want to do when I’m on a great coding bender. Thanks.

8. Feel free to ask who will be doing the implementation of the software you’re selling. It might be me and not the IT guy, and you might not want to spend the next hour going, “You’ll LOVE this feature, John!”

9. Be either remarkable or very brief.