I saw a tweet come over the wire from an excited tweep about her friend's Twitter-sponsorship deal. I almost puked.
I won't call these folks out by name or anything, but suffice to say that a Big Ass Corporation You've All Dealt With made a short-term deal with a fairly popular blogger/Twitter user wherein she would "promote" a now-released product by this corporation. There was an article about this in a major publication a while ago, and after reading it, I came away with the feeling that somebody had just defiled Gumby or something.
I think their approach was going to be that in their tweets for a period of time, they'd drop quotes from the big corporation's ad campaign (properly hashtagged, of course) and in other ways promote the big corporation's product.
The thing that made me really wanna vomit was a post on this person's blog explaining that this deal might "teach others how to leverage the social media world for profit."
I want one fucking place on the net that hasn't been perverted into use as just another channel through which shitheads try to sell me stuff.
Email was lost a long time ago. The web. Instant messaging. Streaming media. All fucked up now. All turned away from what could have been higher purposes, and instead mostly used to try to get me to buy more fucked-up shit built by humans for other humans to throw away eventually.
Thing is, I am not going to go into a big tear about all this here. Joe The Peacock already took care of pretty much all my thoughts about the topic:
Twitter, by and large, is a gigantic circle-jerk of marketing and SEO "Experts" and conservative Republican dipshit retards, all tweeting and following one another in the hopes that they'll get followed back to make their numbers look great, then go off and sell their strategies to companies.
He does lead off earlier in the piece by saying succinctly, "if you actually
have a Twitter Strategy, you're a dickhead."
Yeah.
A lot of you are probably confused by now, since a lot (and I mean a LOT) of the people I listen to and talk to on Twitter are in social media, SEO, marketing and related things. And you're probably thinking that a bunch of said people will unfollow and/or block me as a result of me essentially kicking their puppy. Well, I don't really think so. Not one, to my knowledge, of the people with whom I talk on Twitter has ever perverted the system to use as a "marketing strategy," even if they use or even build tools to support people doing just that. If they
were the sorts of people Joe The Peacock was talking about, I'd never have followed them in the first place. I can sniff out a marketing droid four hundred meters away in a locked refrigerator. In fact, the tweet I mention at the top of the post here wasn't actually by the sponsored blogger/tweeter, it was by someone else who doesn't do this for a living. I wouldn't consider following the subject blogger, even though she's a babe, specifically because she appears to want to use Twitter in support of "her brand."
Buy a fucking AdSense Adword like everybody else, and leave Twitter alone, will ya?
And a side note: yes, if you
look at my list of followers, you'll find that I am either followed by or that I follow some obviously-corporate accounts. Bissell, IdeaJam, Lotus Education, some others. Almost without exception, though, these accounts are used by their owners to
listen to people, not to hawk things to them. Believe me, if all of a sudden Gayle and Bruce started sending me "daily updates" on what Elguji is up to, they (or anyone else who did this) would get shitcanned pretty much instantly.
And yes, I have multiple Twitter accounts for myself. One of them is for our rabbitry, but no, I don't post weekly wabbit deals on there or anything. That account (like, I think, the IdeaJam account is for the Elgorts) is targeted to those people who (a) want more corporate/product/promo information and (b) expect it.
The thing that galls me about the subject blogger/tweeter is that they built an enormous following on their "personal brand," a following built little by little on the posts that are the core of Twitter:
what are you doing? And then they pervert it to use that channel -- built on one understanding -- in a repurposed way as a thinly-disguised ad campaign for a third party.
This would be like going to a Dead Kennedys concert and having Jello Biafra suddenly break into a (serious) jingle for McDonald's or the Republican Party.
It's also not unlike the first time I paid to go see a movie and then had to sit through ads for Chevrolet and AT&T.
Whenever what you're doing on Twitter causes a WTF reaction among people who've been following you, you lose. When they look at your post and say, "wait, has some spambot taken over their account, or what?" you lose.
Folks, even Twitter doesn't "monetize" Twitter. Sure, it's an ongoing mystery how they make any money (or IF they make any money), but at least they remain pure to the ethic summed up in one simple question:
What are you doing?
not,
What are you selling this time? Your soul?
Want to kill Twitter? "Monetize" it.03/24/2009 10:15 AM
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