Email a guru out of the blue, and not only are you likely to get ignored, but you’re probably going to get ignored by the guru’s executive assistant. (If you want the privilege of being ignored by the guru him/herself, you’ve got to get past their gatekeepers first!)

Fortunately, there’s a fast track to contacting many gurus that’s sitting wide open: Twitter.

If your target guru is an active Twitterer, here’s what you do:

  1. Join Twitter (duh!)
  2. Follow them
  3. Watch for an opportunity to reply to one of their tweets
  4. Reply to the tweet (may as well bookend the list with another “duh!”)

Your reply needs to be more than just “hey, great tweet”. They may tweet a “thanks” in response to something like that (or they may not), but they’re not likely to remember you if you don’t say something worth exercising a brain cell to read.

I’ve had a little back-and-forth on Twitter with a couple of gurus (who I wasn’t stalking — it just arose naturally).

The first was Harris Fellman. That dude is hilarious, so it stands to reason that he might respond to humor. And in fact, several times when I’ve come up with a comical response to one of his tweets, he’s tweeted back, showing that my tweet hit its mark.

The second was Michel Fortin. In Michel’s case, first contact was made through a comment I posted on his blog. It linked to a related post on my blog, which he tweeted about and tweeted to me that he’d tweeted it (…there must be some way to talk about this stuff without using the “T” word so often!)

I tweeted back to thank him for the tweet and the reply, which reminded me that I wasn’t following him on Twitter yet (not sure why not!) He replied to that too. And a few days ago, he tweeted another of my blog posts.

Enough concrete fact and history — time to concoct a murky theory.

Why is it that a guru who’d probably never even see an email you sent them* will read and respond to a tweet? (* I don’t mean to imply that I have any idea whether Harris and Michel have assistants ruthlessly filtering their email or not — I’m generalizing here). And could you get the same results through other social media sites?

My theory is that Twitter is the king of this kind of interaction because of what makes it unique: all messages are limited to 140 characters.

A lot of people wouldn’t read, much less respond to, a 10 page email from their own grandmother. An internet marketer wannabe trying to leach off the success and good name of a guru doesn’t stand a chance in that medium.

But a meaty, well-crafted 140 character message? Sure, no problem.

By forcing us to be ruthlessly concise with our messages*, Twitter has created a medium that even busy, important people can find time for.

(* You CAN post a series of tweets to say something longer, but I’m betting that if you abuse that method, you’ll get unfollowed and blocked by a lot of people.)