Tweeting all the way to the bank: Spam, authenticity and social product endorsements
In response to my recent post on social product endorsements, Steve Odom wrote an enlightening comment about how he’s used the micro-blogging site Twitter as a source for informal product recommendations. He says:
I’m pretty sure I’ve bought something because someone on Twitter “endorsed” a product. If they liked the product so much as to announce it on Twitter, I knew it must be a great product. There are 2 other factors that built credibility. I knew that they weren’t being compensated for it. And I liked that there was not any “system” for providing this recommendation; it was just organic through Twitter.
This comment preceded a post on Mashable this past week about a spammer site called Tweet2Win (and no, I’m not linking to them) promoting themselves by asking Twitterers to include their domain in tweets for a chance to win prizes. They even offer helpful suggested tweets such as:
www.tweet2win.com Has anyone heard of this site? You can register free and win prizes for Twitter status updates.
Pseudo-realistic sounding tweets for spam schemes like this could do a fair amount of damage to Twitter as a platform for authentic and valuable product recommendation experiences like Steve’s. Though people are pretty good at sniffing out a paid statement, less blatant references could slip in under our collective spam radars. At least Robert Scoble had the decency to precede his semi-infamous Seagate advertisement tweet with “ADVERTISEMENT:”.
As social software services like Twitter cast about searching for a business model to go along with all that VC money, there’s going to be more of this toeing the line between the organic and the paid. On Twitter at least, most of the experimentation (excluding Twitter Japan) is being done by somewhat sketchy third parties. However, Facebook’s beacon was an example of the company behind a social service turning its user-base into (largely unsuspecting) endorsers. Look for more tension (and hopefully some compromise) between the free social software Utopians and the “hey, I’d like that 10x return now” business guys as we collectively try to figure out how to do this right.
Update 6/14/2008 @ 6:30 PM CDT: Scoble discusses how he’s not paid by anyone except Fast Company to pimp anything.
Hayes @ June 14, 2008