Paid Shilling Comes to Twitter 134
An anonymous reader alerts us that an outfit called Magpie is paying Twitter users to tout advertisers' products. Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb has identified a number of household-name companies — among them Apple, Skype, Kodak, Cisco, Adobe, Roxio, PC Tools, and Box.net — whose products are hyped by identically worded, paid Magpie tweets. But comments to Kirkpatrick's post, including one from a Box.net spokesman, make it sound likely that these shills were paid for not by the companies themselves, but by affiliate marketers. That may not matter. In the same way that Belkin recently got burned paying consumers to write complimentary online reviews about the company's products, the makers of products and services touted through Magpie may find themselves tainted in the backlash from this new form of astroturfing. Kirkpatrick concludes his post: "So there's the Twitter-sphere for you! Bring on 'real time search,' bring on a globally connected community, bring on vapid, vile, stupid shilling. It all seems pretty sad to me."
Identical problem as email spam (Score:2, Interesting)
Start suing the ad sponsors. They are usually large companies.
Just include a clause in the account startup agreement. Then go after the $$$. Could be profitable.
Post Spamming... (Score:2, Interesting)
... should be disallowed.
As a Level 4 at Apple's forums, whenever we mentioned a third party product or service to solve a posters problem, we had to disclose a disclaimer that we were not rewarded by the third party for the plug.
As a moderator for another site, the site owner allowed post spamming and the result was a take over of the site by marketers and the normal posters soon vanished, the site later died.
Posters want honest opinions and judgements from fellow posters and users, not targeted spam from marketers.
Shrinking Response Times (Score:4, Interesting)
Twitter's not just bad for this - oh my, a new form of spam, I never saw it coming - but for poor context community as well. I feed my Tweets to my blog in a widget (Geekiest phrase ever, I know) and, thus, am searchable. Now, I put up a "Legal" page about my site - claiming authorship and all - and immediately was added by nearly forty Law-oriented "Free Advice" Twits who likely had never read another of my posts. I changed the page's name from "Legal" to "Disclaimer" and the additions halted. Changing the page to "Copyright" had the same effect - media trolls, dozens of them, now on my block list. It's incredible.
Twitter's nice for micro-posting, but seriously. This shilling thing? Been going on for some time. It's nothing new.
Re:This isn't surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
When will marketers realize... (Score:3, Interesting)
that when we get inundated with the same message again and again, it turns people Off on the product?
It alienates me at any rate, and particularly so if its endorsement type advertisement, since those usually have no actual information in them and usually feature actors hired to say their lines, ie they are lying.
I more or less ignore ads, I bypass them when I read them in the newspaper, or in a magazine. I speed past them with my PVR when I am watching TV, and I mute them if I can't bypass them. Oh I know the rule is to reach a consumer as many ways as possible and that in theory that is more likely to make them buy your product, but I think its backfiring these days because we see far too many ads.
Marketers: I am not interested in your product, whatever the fuck it is. If I want something I will go research it myself, read honest reviews (if I can find any, harder and harder these days), and then decide if I really need the product. If I do, I go buy it, if its crappy or I don't need it, I don't buy it. I buy virtually nothing based on seeing an advertisement as far as I can tell. I often specifically avoid products I can recall seeing Ads for because 99% of them are more irritating than informative, and they all seem to be based on outright lying about a product. For the most part if I can recall your ad, I won't buy your product, because if I can recall your ad, I have likely seen it so many times it makes me want to puke
I am exposed to so much media and have so many people trying to grab my attention that I more or less ignore them all
This onslaught of media screaming - Capitalist Propaganda if you wish - is tiring, and only pisses me off. I am sure I am not alone.
Now, products I do like I am more than willing to support in discussions with my friends and fellow workers, but I would never stoop so low as to become a shill for the company that made them.
One of the only upsides to Communism I can think of was there was almost no marketing and advertising. Shakespeare had it wrong, the firs thing we do is shoot all the marketers :P
Why do you sound surprised? (Score:3, Interesting)
Any medium will be used for advertising. It's pure naivety to believe that your precious Twitter will remain pure and unsullied.
Re:Nice to know- but who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
Twitter is not useless. As a software developer I regularly check on Twitter what people say about my software. Dozens of improvements have been made thanks to feedback on Twitter. Many users also regularly check my tweets in order to be informed about software updates and other things that they might be interested in.