Back is Beautiful. Or, Simply, Thank you
As you may have noticed, I was suspended from twitter from late Tuesday to pretty much all of Wednesday for two days starting September 23rd, (2009) . I am still to receive a reason why I was suspended, and it would be interesting to know why/how I trip the filter. Full explanation of the Twitter ban is found here.
However the real story was the search community support! To be honest I still don’t have the words to really describe what I felt when I saw the absolute storm of support raging through. As you can see below, the show-of-support tweets came in fast and furious in a space of a few hours. And in fact, as you can see, the SEO community tried to get #rishil trending. And although that didn’t happen – in this instance it is definitely an extreme valiant effort and heart-warming to see. At its peak, I counted over 500 tweets…
I knew I had good relationships with people in the search world, what I was unaware of was my value in the search community. The tweets above don’t even show the FaceBook messages, texts, calls, emails chat messages, SEOMoz DMs that came through. I didn’t know that this was the level of regard the community held me in. If this wasn’t a case study in the value of building ties in online communities then I don’t know what is.
I am going to give a special Mention to Brent D Payne (see) who took the fight to his contacts in the twitter world and Al Carlton (twitter) who took the fight offline and called people he knew up. I am also going to give special mentions to Kate Morris (see) and Jill Whalen (see), who I think checked if my profile was back more than I did! A special mention to Rob Bothan and Josh Millord and Dixon Jones whoI believe started the whole thing…
And I wish I could thank everyone of you individually, but hopefully one day I will be able to. I am pretty sure that people who didn’t know me echoed Kenny Hyder’s sentiments:
“I don’t even know @rishil and I want his account unsuspended so I can stop hearing about it”
I must admit the funniest tweet of the barrage was by Stephen Tallamy:
“I’d rather see @rishil in suspenders than see his account suspended #rishil”
The tweets were coming in fast and furious, but I felt (paradox alert) the twitter support deserved more than just a tweet of thanks. This is my thanks. I choke back the wave of warmth I felt seeing all of you chip in. I still cant find the words of appreciation. I am glad twitter suspended me, cause otherwise I would have never realised what you guys felt about me. I have mentioned often I don’t feel I am a Rockstar, but that day you made me feel like one.
Once again, Thank you.
Rishi Lakhani is an independent Online Marketing Consultant specialising in SEO, PPC, Affiliate Marketing and Social Media. Explicitly.Me is his Blog. Google Profile
