Will Clumsy Heavy-Handed Internet Marketers Destroy Twitter? (Or Have They Already?)
Just in the short time since I joined Twitter, there seems to have been a veritable explosion of spammy Internet Marketing (IM) messages on Twitter, pretty much coinciding with the veritable explosion of Twitter’s popularity.
Twitter was originally conceived as a social site (”What are you doing?”).
Someone needs to clue most TwitIMers that Tweeting nothing but
”Need More Customers to visit your website? Take a peek at this: http://snurl.com/xxxxxxx”
”$1 trial. $7 a month subscription. http://bit.ly/xxxxxxx Learn to trade a $1000 account to a fortune.”
”work from home in your spare time http://bit.ly/xxxxxxx”
”Amazing marketing tool. 100% effective. You need to check this out .. http://bit.ly/dOZE0ff”
is insanely STUPID and brands them as unsociable jackasses.
As Perry Belcher has said, “Twitter is like a big party.” Actual business takes place off-Twitter (i.e., after the party).
People who market this way on Twitter are being “SOCIAL” and making connections with their audience. This approach takes time and requires more engagement than spewing out dopey, obvious product pitches and bit.ly-compressed affiliate links.
But that’s the hard road. The easy/stupid road is the one being taken by lazy, heavy-handed TwitIMers. And there are more of them than there are Twitter-members-who-also-market who focus on being real people and making connections with their audiences. A LOT more of them.
The bottom line is that the clumsy, lazy, stupid, heavy-handed TwitIMers are making Twitter increasingly annoying for everybody.
What to do? Like email spam, nobody is ever going to be able to stop spam on Twitter entirely. However, since Twitter is a single organization (unlike email), Twitter can effectively deploy tactics to combat the problem. Hopefully without throwing out the likable baby with the stinky bathwater.
There are also fast, easy, simple things individual users can do, like unfollowing spammy TwitIMers (or not following them in the first place). So we users have a real hand in curbing the proliferation of clumsy, lazy, stupid, heavy-handed TwitIMers
Personally I don’t have a problem with someone making a sincere product recommendation, regardless of the media venue. Heck, I do it from time to time. But I don’t use a robot program to blast out the same damn message every five minutes.
