I Refuse to Let Darren Rovell Define My Self Worth…

dr

Such a Rovell tweet: “Check your info again.” That’s a screen grab of a tweet Darren Rovell sent this morning. He immediately deleted it. I have no clue what the context was… or who it was meant for. I’m guessing it was a Direct Message (DM) he was replying to, but instead, he accidentally replied publicly to one of his own tweets.

You’re probably thinking… who cares? Well… maybe nobody? That’d be ideal. But humor me if you will… and I’ll tell you why I think it’s lob-worthy.

That tweet made me laugh, and it got me to thinking. Rovell knows he’s a “polarizing” figure on twitter, and that tweet you see above is a rookie mistake, something we’ve all (those of us on twitter) done. It’s more comical because it’s Darren Rovell, who many have called the king of the twitter police. I mean, people HATE him for it. National sportswriters will criticize him, then others will come to his defense. Polarizing, indeed.

Personally, I like following him. Sure, I disagree with a lot of what he says and some of his opinions, just like many of you disagree with me at times. Yet, here you are reading. The reality is this, Rovell is well-informed guy and people send him awesome stuff, and he tweets it out. There’s value in that.

Rovell has retweeted my stuff a few times before and it’s safe to say he’s responsible for a handful of my followers (tough to put a number on those sort of things). He even started following me…

d-r

Yippee! I only had a few hundred followers so that was pretty cool. You’ll notice that @DarrenRovell currently has over 332,000 followers and works for ESPN, but he followed me back when he “only” had 110,059 followers and worked for CNBC. It was August 2011 to be exact. This past winter, I tried to respond to a DM he sent me. I couldn’t. You can only DM people that are following you. *gasp* He’d unfollowed. So I had to respond to his DM with a public tweet. Power move. No biggie though… I’m not gonna let my personal worth be wrapped up in who does and who doesn’t follow me on twitter. I didn’t really think anything of it. Honestly, I didn’t care. I refuse to care. You should too. The reality is this, I follow new people on twitter all the time… seek out some new folks to see if I’m into what they’ve got to say. However, if I’m not into it, I’ll unfollow. This is life on hard streets of twitter.  It happens.

Shortly after I noticed Rovell had unfollowed me, he did a story on fake jerseys and was asking his followers for examples. Knowing that I had the sweetest fake jersey story in all the land… I sent him an email to a gmail account he’d set up for the submissions. Here’s the conversation we had:

lobshots-unfollow

[Click to enlarge.] He didn’t even know he’d unfollowed me! Who’d-a-thunk-it?

That was it, that was the end of our convo… and we haven’t communicated since. He never re-followed me. Again, no biggie. I guess in the end, the important thing to remember about twitter, and about all social media, is that you can’t let this kinda thing get to you. Let it go. You can’t define who you are by who follows you on twitter. It’s silly. It’s not healthy.

I have a wife and two little kids… I have friends and family that love me, that know me… me, Brady… not me, BP from @Lobshots. Apologies if it sounds like I’m preaching at the twitter world here, but it really saddens me to see folks get so bent out of shape by their social media worth. You’re better than that. You want to use twitter? Good for you, it can be an awesome tool if used correctly. It can also make really good people feel like crap if they put too much stock into it. So use it… but use it wisely. Remember this, whoever your Darren Rovell is on twitter… who gives a crap if they follow you.

Keep your chin up and go give a real person a hug.

-bp

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