The gaming of Twitter

Monday, September 29. 2008

The gaming of Twitter

Profy notes how its done:

CareerBuilder generated all the activity required to make the name of the site the most discussed topic on Twitter on its own. The thing is that the guys behind the website simply configured a few Twitter accounts (each account focused on a particular city) to broadcast all the latest job positions advertised on CareerBuilder automatically to Twitter. This resulted in a few dozens of new tweets posted to a few timelines belonging to different CareerBuilder geographical sections every hour (as I believe they must have some moderation for new jobs where they approve new postings to the site in bulk).

I also suspect that these tweets are posted using some sort of a script as they show “from web” as the posting method while normally when we see such automatic tweets published via RSS we see “from Twitterfeed” there. Unfortunately I don’t think it is realistic to publish more than 1 tweet every minute manually from the web interface, I think CareerBuilder has a script in place to automatically transmit all the jobs. But since I don’t think it violates Twitter ToS in any way, it is Ok - the only thing it proves is that this frequent posting of updates is intentional.

But heck, I reckon more than half the A Listers on it and various OTT "community managers" knew that already

. Its just that this is maybe the first to use an automated process - and we showed you how this could be done back in May.

Posted by Alan Patrick in Online Advertising at 09:44 | Comments (4) | Trackbacks (0)

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I was not talking about gaming of Twitter to have your posts appear constantly in the timeline, I was talking about Twitter trends only where people can instantly bring their brands to the most popular topics on Twitter. And by the way, I have not seen any A-listers that have reached the A-status using such a technique - manual or automated.

#1 Svetlana Gladkova (Homepage) on 2008-09-30 13:59 (Reply)

I am aware of that re your post, my point was that these things are a natural extension of your example, my examples are tongue in cheek but the underlying technology is very real.

Re A listers - my point was that a number of them are extremely prolific, ditto some services community managers - I recall a very good post a few weeks ago saying that many of these people are skilled communicators and use Twitter more as a performance broadcast platform (must find the post)

#2 alan p on 2008-09-30 14:38 (Reply)

Alan, underlying technology of cheating Twitter is definitely not difficult to grasp, I just wanted to point to the irony of the trends and how easy they can be manipulated.

And skilled communicators (using Twitter and other social networks) to broadcast their message is very different from spammers using the techniques some companies like CareerBuilder employ for self-promotion. A-listers are usually those people want to listen to - and if the message is unclear and delivered in a spammy manner, no one will want to listen (or we'd have half Twitter as A-listers, obviously).

#2.1 Svetlana Gladkova (Homepage) on 2008-10-01 09:56 (Reply)

@Svetlana - we are in furious agreement then re irony, we clearly were just pointing it out in mutually unintelligible ways - ironic hey

My point re skilled communicators was semi tongue in cheek (see my earlier post that I linked to) but semi serious, as I do think it is being (ab)used as a broadcast system by frequent posters of all stripes - fwiw I no longer follow some heavy tweeting A listers on Twitter, I dump em to Friendfeed cos it allows a daily email dump

#3 alan p on 2008-10-01 14:47 (Reply)

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