A big thumbs up to Sarah Perez over at ReadWriteWeb for her excellent post on needing a marketer filter on Twitter. I couldn’t agree more but there’s a couple of things that these marketers, or companies, are doing which is worse than just counting own our gullibility in order to promote their products. After all, as Sarah points out, who wouldn’t want to win a MacBook Pro.
The way they are doing this ‘promotion’ is really just another way to game Twitter, and us, by manipulating what has become an integral part of Twitter – the hashtags. I’ve taken exception before to the abuse of hashtags and how the misuse of them is detrimental to the use of Twitter. By their definition in the Twitter ecosphere hashtags are meant to identify a specific tweet as belonging to a larger conversation on a current ‘hot’ or trending subject.
What this kind of use of hashtags is doing is totally diluting the power of an conversation identification syntax. Regardless of the inane argument that the company isn’t doing anything wrong by getting people to add some specific hashtag like some hanging chad onto their message the fact is as this continues to happen hashtags will start to suffer from the same fate as the majority of online advertising – hashtag blindness.
What’s actually more concerning than spam, however, is the new trend we’ll call "tweet to win." Legitimate companies have begun using Twitter to promote a message – essentially an advertisement about their business’s offerings. To cajole twitizens into "spamming" their followers in this way, they’re offering prizes or the chance to win prizes in return.
The other integral part of Twitter that stands to be ruined as a valuable metric and conversation identifier is the “Tweet to Win” method of retweeting a specific message as Sarah points out in her post. Right now there is a lot of talk in social media about the value of Retweets and how they are an important way to see what the hot conversations are.
However by getting people to first tweet about the contest and encourage their followers to ReTweet that same message the whole principal behind ReTweeting is watered down. The more and more it happen the less value ReTweets will have to the point where they become totally useless.
Adam Ostrow at Mashable might think that this latest marketing campaign by moonfruit is a perfect example of viral marketing on Twitter done right but I don’t. As far as I am concerned efforts like this one from moonfruit and any other “Tweet to Win” marketing campaign only diminishes the value of Twitter further.
At least spammers I can report and block (when the option actually works) but this type of marketing only tempts me to unfollow and/or block people I found interesting enough to follow. Thanks for that.
