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CNN featuring your question on Twitter gets you 22 new followers
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At the Jan. 19 debate, CNN took their crowdsourcing of debate questions to Twitter, pulling a question pushed by user Michael Browne at 7:31 p.m. Many networks have asked for community contributions: During our debate in early January, Yahoo! asked readers for potential questions via Yahoo! Answers. When the question was broadcast during Thursday's debate, Browne had a mere 9 followers, and no avatar (the egg image is what Twitter uses until you upload a profile picture). It was only his 65th tweet ever.
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By the end of the debate, Michael Browne had 32 followers and had tweeted twice more, expressing incredulity that his question made the cut. It was an interesting choice for CNN--while the question was certainly topical, the user has no profile information and little history on Twitter--the majority of his tweets are directed at other users, or are retweets. Sharing a profile with information about yourself and contributing original content are highly valued on social networking services, signaling that a user is genuine and has a stake in the community as a whole. Just not as valuable as asking the right question at the exact right time.
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