It's Steve (now in blog form)

This morning I posted something silly on Please Wash Hands about exploding poop.  Within a couple of minutes we were getting followed by PoopPal on Twitter.  That’s the danger of automated search and follow.  Sure I mentioned poop repeatedly, but I wasn’t looking for assistance.  Failure to consider sentiment makes this type of behavior annoying rather than effective.

It’s interesting that the abuse is starting to kick in on Twitter.  Quantcast has them at 6 million monthly uniques.  That seems to be the inflection point for abuse on social sites.  I hope they can sort it out before things get really out of hand.

Update: PoopPal is less automated than I thought.  His response to my post:

@stevepearman I agree there is a lot of questionable practices going around, but I am not interested in your money, just your poop

Well said, sir.  I stand corrected.

Here’s a weird one.  I recently finished the Cryptonomicon (the first 800 or so pages were great.  The last 20 were just terrible).  Anyway, Douglas Shaftoe is one of the main characters in the book.  The weird part is that a couple days after finishing the read, I’m now being followed on Twitter by this fictional character who only tweets segments of the book.  Very strange.  Check him out.

The bit I’m trying to sort out is what mechanism triggered the follow.  I’m using Living Social these days to catalog my reading activities, but I’m not sure how the leap was made from there to my twitter account.  Going to have to do some digging.

The other day I wrote up a really positive marketing program I was on the receiving end of on Twitter (again, good job WubbzyJen).  It seems that some of you were interested in the topic so here’s a little follow up.

This is my Twitter account.  After I talked about the Wubbzy encounter I got a couple of new Twitter followers.  The first was TwittMarketing.  His bio:

Name Twit Marketing
Location California
Web http://tweetvirus.com
Bio Want your Tweets to go Viral? Click the link above to learn how.

This stuff makes me sad.  Twitter is a slick communication vehicle.  That always seems to drag in the exploiters.  I don’t want my tweets to go viral.  I certainly don’t want to get followed by random folks with Twitter bots.  This is exactly the sort of behavior that forces folks to move their communications out of the public discourse and lock things down.

Another follower turned up about the same time.  http://twitter.com/socialnetmarket Wow!  Could this be true?!? “Major Web 2.0 training lauches Thrus Jan 22 2009. Private Invitation Only – tweet me up soon to get signed up”  That sounds fantastic!  I’m gonna get in on the ground floor.

Anyway, this is what it looks like when authentic communication starts to get undermined by profiteers.  Believe me, I know a lot about how dangerous these guys can be to a community.  They’re insidious not because they are flooding, but because they are attempting to proliferate the idea that lots of people should engage in this sort of behavior.  Don’t get me wrong, most of the people who will buy and use this stuff are nice people just trying to make some extra cash.  But when enough amateur marketeers get involved, the larger signal to noise ratio of the entire community can skew the wrong way.  

Dang, I really liked Twitter…

I really can’t believe it. Yesterday I was on the receiving end of a marketing ploy on Twitter that was well conceived. I know, it sort of freaked me out too. Most marketeers don’t understand the social space. I don’t want your brand to randomly hassle me. I don’t want a generic friend request from your crispy fried chicken/fancy new car/extreme type soda. If I seek out a brand that’s one thing, but intrusive outreach makes me want to flame them.

Anyway, this is my Twitter. I updated my status to “can’t help but wonder why Wow Wow Wubbzy is so great.” If you haven’t seen Wow Wow Wubbzy I would strongly recommend it. It’s sort of like Japanimation and Rainbow Bright had a kid who takes a tremendous amount of ecstasy. Ben loves it. There’s a good chance I’d watch it after a couple of cocktails even if I didn’t have a kid. Then next morning I had some one new following me on Twitter: WubbzyJen.

The first thing you always do when someone follows you is to check them out. Her bio:

Bio Hi, my name is Jennifer! I work with Wubbzy and would love to talk. Feel free to tweet me with any questions or comments about anything Wubbzy.

Her Twitter profile also had a link to the official Wubbzy blog. Somebody at Nick Jr. in the illustrious Wubbzy division gets how to do this stuff. Some important rules were followed:

1. Social marketing requires laser beams, not shotguns – I got hit up because I’d mentioned Wubbzy already. They pre-qualified that I might be receptive before the targeted me.
2. Take the light touch approach – The wrong thing to do in this scenario would have been to shoot a direct message over with something like “Hey! YOU LIKE WUBBZY! YOU SHOULD FOLLOW US ON TWITTER BECAUSE WE’RE MARKETING AND IT WILL BE COOL AND EXTREME AND [insert additional buzz words here]!!” They only followed me which is as light as it gets on Twitter
3. Use people – The Twitter account was for some staffer named Jen, not for the show itself. That makes me way less likely to get pissed off since people connection is the model that we generally adhere to in the Twitter format.
4. Engage with me, don’t market at me – Clearly they wanted me to end up on the Wubbzy blog. But they resisted the temptation to have every Tweet be a demand to visit. They stuck with the common practice of linking to it only from the home page and focusing the Tweets on actual communication with fans.

So there you go. Marketing on a social platform that doesn’t suck. Now here’s some Wubbzy to soothe your brain.