Sell Your Soul for Bling: Be a Magpie
October 31, 2008 12 Comments
I was in my twitter stream today, and was very surprised when I saw a twit that caught my eye.
The site is a twitter advertising network that uses twitterers to spread their marketing. The idea is that the application analyzes your twitter stream for relevance, then spread out amongst your tweets, it injects the occasional ad tweet.
Human Bill Boards
Imagine you’re talking to your freind about what you had for lunch today, and all of a sudden he blurts out” Subway EAT FRESH!”.
You can see why this is jarring…it takes away the purity of your opinion because it’s not even a real endoresement…it’s just verbal advertising diarrhea . So, according to their faq, it says that there are two criteria that are used to mete out the advertisements and the reward people receive for selling out, the first is “hotness of the tweet topic” and second the number of followers you have…
GREAT! Lets ENCOURAGE people to create BOTS to follow people and vomit up advertising at us…Congratulations…You’ve just created a whole new method to SPAM on Twitter! HOORAY!
Save your soul, DON’T BE a MAGPIE!
Hmmm, I wonder if there is a way to sell links with http://www.linkxl.com rather than just on random twitterdoodle posts.
Or at least on some of the profiles which actually have PR.
I tried it, and made quite a few bucks right after signing up … Not too bad. Guess I will stick with it, at a low ad frequency though.
@tim
Do you have an example of the tweets it spits out? I think that might go a ways for me to actually see the quality of this program.
@John
I see this as maybe a step up, because the advertisers are providing and publishing their own tweets through your platform. That’s like every 5th blog post of mine being a pre-written ad… I’m still not sure I’m comfortable with it…
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Donna
@Donna, thanks for the nomination
This just shows that marketing is being forced to evolve as we, the end consumers, become more and more immune to forced communications. “Spam” is slowly being forced into extinction by better and better filtration and increased focus on cultivating opt in mailing lists. So what is the modern email marketer to do?
do what is right… strive to cultivate healthy lists… if you must buy a list and put your sender reputation score at risk… then send an opt in message… then a reminder message… and take what you can… don’t settle back into the forced marketing habits of our predecessors… you might get a .25-.5 percent return on what you send… is that worth the hit to your sender reputation score?
finding a loophole like this for spam is not the solution…
this service is an abomination….
More and more, Idiocracy becomes a documentary rather than a comedy.
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I guess it’s the ad frequency that would bother me, but most responsible twitters would set it at very low or risk losing followers. So I guess seeing some responsible use is okay, as long as it isn;t in a stream of advertising or rss feeds of other spam, but people who do that don’t get many followers anyway!
@thewebgarden
I think you may have a valid point, about it being editorially controlled by the twitter owner. However, that implies that the twitter owner cares about losing followers…and if they’re a spammer, they won’t because they’ll just follow a bunch of new people who may auto follow back. That’s what I’m concerned about- It’s huge potential for abuse… Perhaps if Magpie stated “Twitter accounts that have a disporportionate number of followers to how many they follow will be considered spammers and not be allowed to use our system”
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I don’t think I would like to have that many ads that often. I think you’d have to have some way of ensuring that it’s used responsibly.
I agree, it was a bit disconcerting when I used it on one of my accounts- I turned it off after not too long-