I just feel like I need to mark the occasion:  I got my 500th follower on Twitter today!

That means that 500 people have elected to see everything I tweet on their home page, ever day.  Day after day.  All the time.  Who are these people??

Actually I know who they are, and anyone can see for him/herself at www.twitter.com/stephfierman.  It’s an eclectic group of digital, business, marketing, PR, advertising, social media, non-profit and strategy folks… and I thank every one.

And I’m learning more and more about how Twitter works every day, too.  If you want someone to follow you, for example, start retweeting their tweets until they notice.  They’ll check you out, decide they’re interested in what you have to say and voilà! your favorite ad agency or magazine decides to follow you.

I’ve mentioned him before, but Kent Huffman is doing an incredible job on Twitter, transforming simple but great ideas into an ever-widening community that’s good for him and everyone else.  He started with the most popular CMOs on Twitter and has now created a list of the top marketing authors.  He gives a shout-out to everyone on these lists, they pick up followers, positive karma comes back to Kent and on it goes.  Brilliant.

There are also new automatic tools that are supposed to help you with Twitter arriving every day.  Some are helpful, some are not.  One that I tested this weekend puts supposedly like-minding people onto your “Followers” list automatically.  One of these new follower’s business pages involved the words “live s*x” - I kid you not - so there’s spam and garbage on Twitter just like everywhere else on the Web.  But TweetDeck, Seesmic and Tweetie for Mac and iPhone all have fans.

So thank you, Carol Phillips, for being my 500th follower.  Carol is a professor at Notre Dame and an expert on millenials marketing.  The chance of me “meeting” Carol and hearing her ideas (because now I’m following her) without Twitter?  Quite close to zero.  So that’s pretty great.

What might you find on Twitter?