There once was a bar where everyone could go and everyone would know their name. The connections, from the joy to the pain, was what made this such a cool place to hang out. You knew you had a friend when you entered that bar because everyone would shout out your name when you walked through the door.

Which leads me to examine the recent quest to add as many followers as you can on Twitter. All of the celebrities are doing it, and now Twitter has limited the mass collection of followers. Adding followers may make you feel special, unique, powerful, but it won’t do much to help you create a community.

Here’s why: Twitter is a forum for tweet-to-tweet communication, a variant on face-to-face, which allows you to build a relationship. How do you maintain relationships with 1 million people. You don’t. You scream out to them and broadcast messages to them, but you don’t ever really connect. The crowd is too large and at best you can only carry on a one-on-one conversation with a handful of people.

If you want to build a following, you must do it one at a time. And you need to engage those followers. It’s the notion of becoming a celebrity: people feel a connection and tell others. For a time the rapid collection of followers may work to draw a crowd, but holding onto that crowd will require much more than just a pretty face and a large following. It’s going to require engagement, care, and the ability to know who’s coming through the door so you can shout out their name.