To help get @askforfairtrade started I’ve done a few manual searches on Twitter and have started following people talking about Fairtrade.

But part of the goal of @askforfairtrade (alongside checking who is and who isn’t sticking to their promises to offer Fairtrade coffee) is to encourage people who may not have instinctively thought about choosing a Fairtrade option to ask for it.

So seeing Zarah’s mention of Twollo, a Twitter service which will auto-follow people with particular interests on Twitter, I’m wondering whether @askforfairtrade should be set up to auto-follow people talking about tea or coffee? Or is auto-following by the @askforfairtrade campaigning twitter account too invasive?

If we were to use auto-following, then what key phrases or interests should we auto-follow? A search for Coffee on twitter turns up far to many results… so we might want to narrow down to phrases that might indicate someone is heading out to buy coffee.

So:

• Do you think auto-following has a place in the @askforfairtrade campaigning experiment?
  
• If so, what phrases could we / should we use to determine who gets auto-followed?

I’ll look at any responses here in the next week or so and will look at whether or not to try an auto-follow…