Twitter Spam or Twitter Corned Beef?
There’s been a lot of comment lately on good and bad uses of Twitter for promotional purposes. Much of it centres on the use of #hashtags as a tool for Spamming. (For further information on #hashtag principles see here.)
Now the use of #hashtags for PR may or may not be a great idea. Habitat’s recent foray into sofas and politics was pretty dumb, as documented here by Mashable …but if executed sensibly then it can be a great way of establishing followings and getting involved in timely and relevant conversations.
My problem with this general discussion is not in ‘outing’ poor uses of Twitter. This is good: we need to learn from the bad. There’s too much of it about, and the rise of bots and agents are beginning to make Twitter an unnecessarily crowded and noisy place.
But the war on #hashtags seems a little off kilter to me. Take this recent post from Econsultancy on the ‘Seven Twitter Sins’ for example…
Habitat is a great example of #hastag abuse. But is Moonfruit too? Some would disagree ….and the campaign’s phenomenal response suggests it was well received.
To my mind, the notion of Spamming is a difficult one to pin on Twitter usage. Twitter is, after all, a public network not a private network. It’s also free. We don’t own or lease it. Anybody can follow and message anybody else. There are no real restrictions on membership – it’s just a public place. More to the point, Twitter is a service without a well defined mission. You just turn up, sign up and say whatever the hell you want. Most activity is unsolicited and undirected – even amongst friends. It has no rules and this is a large part of its charm.
As such, can anything on Twitter really be classed as Spam?
Poorly conceived brand #hashtag campaigns are just annoying: like strangers who rant loudly in train stations. If they’re irrelevant, useless and untimely then they’ll just be blocked out by users and the firm’s reputation will suffer. Otherwise the issue is hard to mitigate without spoiling everything that’s so great about Twitter.
This response to the eConsultancy post sums it all up quite nicely…
Thanks for a dash of clarity Alex. I’m with you… Twitter #hastags make for a good corned beef sandwich.
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