Think of it as your personal brand – as defined by your audience. If you find yourself in lists with the words important or influential, then you’re probably delivering value. Here’s some great analysis using this methodology: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/analysis_influencers_still_signing_up_followers_dont_equal_lists.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29

If on the other hand you start turning up on lists with the term “douche bag”, then perhaps it’s time for a programming change

* hmmmm, ‘interesting person A’ is following ‘potential interesting person B’ — I wonder why? Maybe I’ll check em out.

… and the rest writes itself

For example: at the moment, my favourite activity in twitter is to go and checkout people that look interesting, and then see who ‘they follow’. I usually pick one person in particular, and investigate most of the people the have on their ‘following’ list… from there, the chain begins, rinse and repeat.

So if this pattern were true of other twitteres, which I’m sure might well be, one might do very well developing a ‘followership’, depending on the quality of the followers ‘one’ already has.

So in line with the ‘more productive things’ that a twitterer might be doing… one of those things would certainly be attracting more ‘quality’ followers, and benefiting from the flow of ‘better’ traffic that comes by this path.