Guy Kawasaki Can Handle Being Called a Spammer

To kick off his keynote speech at SES, a marketing conference in New York, Guy Kawasaki asked how many people in the audience were on Twitter at that moment. Hands shot up across the packed ballroom.

“Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of,” he said.

The former Apple (AAPL) marketer and current venture capitalist, book author and Web site operator was there to tell attendees how he uses Twitter and interconnected social media tools like Twhirl and TweetDeck to generate buzz and monitor what others are saying about him.

An unabashed fanboy when it comes to the service, Mr. Kawasaki called it “the most powerful marketing tool that I’ve seen since probably television.” Toward the end of his talk, he added: “I love Twitter as much as I love Macintosh. And I love Macintosh.”

He also made enough provocative statements to guarantee that he’ll be retweeted–the Twitter equivalent of forwarding an email–all day. One of the first was his advice that to be successful on the site, you need lots of followers. “I believe that Twitter is a numbers game,” he said.

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