twitter fail blog
sharing the good, and exposing the best of the worst on twitter
Spamalicious
If there is a Hell, we hope it has a special level there for spammers. Lots of molten lava, wailing and gnashing of teeth would be nice.
Spammers are the bottom of the barrel in the advertising world. They waste our resources and our time forcing ads on us, whether we want them or not.
Based on our observations, the spammers on twitter can be broken down into 3 groups. Let us know if you don’t agree.
All Keyed Up
We’re gathered together here today, brothers and sisters, to talk about a cancer that’s spreading through our community. Yea, the good book says that the world’s first television advertisement was broadcast July 1, 1941, and the evil advertisers have been finding ways to steal little bits of our time and attention ever since.
Each piece we lose seems so small, so inconsequential, and that indifference helps them chip away at our freedom to control what we see. “Oh, but it’s just a minute,” you might say. That’s one minute you will never get back. One minute that could be spent voting for a LOLcat or talking like a pirate. One minute when a piece of joy is lost forever.
It started innocently enough. One person recommended a product he liked. And their friends thanked them for the recommendation.
Then the evil advertisers, caring not for your love or friendship, decided to twist an innocent retweet to his selfish advantage. And others followed. Now, what do we have today? We have advertisers running rampant on twitter, pretending to care about you. Evil advertisers who set up keyword searches so they can spam you every time you mention something even remotely similar to the product he’s selling. He’ll make it sound all nice and helpful. But what does he really want? To steal your attention. To steal your time. To sell you something. And, by doing so, he reduces the total joy on twitter. For this, we all suffer.
The advertisers are known by many names. They may look and sound like the guy next door. But don’t be fooled, because they are not here to here to help. No, they are not here to give, they are here to take. So, although it’s hard, you need to take a good look at what an advertiser looks like, so you can arm yourself for the future. Our future.
We must stand up now for all that is right and good on twitter and tell these advertisers that it’s time to go packing! If they approach you, send a DM to @spam, and stop these evildoers in their tracks. We must take back the stream before life on twitter as we know it becomes a cesspool of misused trending topics and hashtags.
Do I hear a “Hell Yes?”
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
Stupid Is
Here’s our basic rule: Want us to notice you? Do something stupid on twitter. Want us to make fun of you? Stupidly accuse us of something stupid while you’re doing stupid things on twitter. Want to make sure we make you look as stupid as possible? Admit to your stupidity, which then makes the topic fair game.
Whenever someone tells us they aren’t a complete idiot, we wonder just how much of an idiot they really are. We’ll let you help us decide.
We first became aware of @tweetermountain when we saw them spamming trending topics.
We’re guessing they think that people following the trending topics will somehow be fooled by this creative copywriting and hop onto their site. We did a quick survey of everyone in the room, and both of us agree that we hate it when someone tries to trick us into looking at an ad. Being the helpful types we are, we posted an informational tweet:
Imagine our surprise when they didn’t take it well, and posted this clever come back:
Now we’re confused. Did they look at our stream or blog? Is this a “Die, asshole, die” comment? Or are they really as stupid as they seem? Hah! You fell for it. Trick question.
With the posting of this item, it all becomes clear. Since they’ve pointed out how this tweet is not MLM junk, we have to wonder, do they sell MLM junk, or just assume everyone else does?
We’re setting up a special award – The Clueless Tweep of the day. @tweetermountain is the first recipient. There’s no prize, but just being nominated should be enough, so Congratulations!
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
Don’t Know, Don’t Care
Twitter can be wonderfully self-correcting. We were alerted to such an event today by Honorary Fail Bird Handler @ephant, who sent us an alert about @megturnr who was dropping big bird bombs on twitter:
Yup, the same message to tweep, after tweep, after tweep:
Interested by widgets? Look at this new kind of widgets alerting you on your desktop (url) Cool a?
The Fail Bird put on his editor hat while reading over my shoulder: No one is interested BY widgets. They may be interested IN widgets. “New kind of widgets” should not be plural, and, “Cool a?” is so wrong, I’m not even going there. (He stomped off in disgust, dropping pinfeathers everywhere, muttering about the dumbing down of the English language, what’s wrong with schools these days, the country is going to hell in a handbasket, yada yada…)
Fortunately, he didn’t have to deal with @megturnr himself. Just like how the unsightly, empty house at the end of the block, rotting on its foundation, spurs the neighborhood to action, the twitter community banded together to do something about their latest spammer.
If you’re reading this @megturnr, you might want to take the friendly advice offered by some of the many people you annoyed. Twitter is not about advertising, it’s making connections and building your reputation. What you’ve done is start off on the wrong foot, which may keep you limping on twitter just long enough to get suspended.
When someone sends spam, or acts in another socially unacceptable way, it makes us suspicious of anything they say or do. The widget may be good. But, we trust word-of-mouth, and @megturnr’s mouth spews crap, so we believe her product must be crap as well.
After getting big pile of negative response, ole Meg posted something new:
No, we don’t. Not at all.
Buh bye.
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Send in the Fail Bird! |
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