After reading a few experiments by John Hassell at NJ.com and Kurt Greenbaum at STLtoday, I decided to try out a Twixperiment myself for MLive‘s sake.

Hassell found 622 people with “New Jersey” in their profiles and started following them with the NJ.com Giants Twitter account.  While in St. Louis, the Post-Dispatch has set up an account that other twitterers can send “@” messages to the account and those messages will be displayed on the P-D’s Politics page.

I wanted to try the same thing P-D is doing to solicit real-time comments on Super Bowl ads, but I’m unsure we could really promote something like that to our readership and get some active participation.

So… My Twixperiment is a little different. Like Hassell, I’m finding all the people with Michigan in their profiles using Twitdir, one of the awesome directories I listed on my Twitter resources post.

I’m planning to enlist several producers to use Twhirl to manage multiple twitter accounts and post interesting news, site updates and messages to interact with the Michigan Twitter community.

Already, I’ve received one tweet that thanked us for putting together this list:

Thanks for the follow-I’ve been hoping someone would start a Michigan twitter group!

Very very nice!

But I’m wondering – will everyone have this reaction? I know a few spammers have followed me and I blocked them after getting some junk tweets. How do you think most Michigan twitterers will react?

How would you react if the most incredible news org in Michigan, or your state, started following your tweets?

One of my producers said “Twitter is a place where I would not expect any privacy.” I think that’s probably true. But I still wonder if any of those we will follow will be put off by our following.

Ah well, off with the Twixperiment!