Rob Thayer

I have to admit something.  When I first heard about Twitter, I thought the whole concept sounded dumb.  Constant updates on the lives of people I don’t know?  No thanks, I’ll pass.

It reminded me of when blogging became really popular.  Tons of people who had no business owning a computer let alone writing a public journal were setting up blogs left and right, recording the minute (and boring) details of their lives.  Frankly, I have better things to do with my time than keeping up on the latest happenings of Sue in Ohio and her 34-pound cat.

So the first notion I had about Twitter was that it was basically the same thing as personal blogs, only there would be hundreds of people spoon-feeding you every excruciating detail of their day-to-day lives and expecting you to do the same.  Even big celebrities like Ashton and Oprah were getting into it.  Yikes.

And do you know what?  I was right.  That’s exactly what Twitter is.  But it’s also more than that.

Twitter is  a great way to meet people who share common interests and pass along or receive information that may be of value.  It’s like social bookmarking for anyone who has the attention span of a gerbil on acid.

I love the fact that in the space of a month I can build a huge network of people in a specific niche with minimal effort on my part.  I love that I can tap into a never-ending stream of information on the topics that interest me right now.  And I love that I can pass along things that I find interesting or humorous and know that it is being appreciated.

What I hate about Twitter is the spam.  There are a lot of really solid people on Twitter who keep their own marketing to a minimum and are more interested in building trust relationships with others.  But there are also a lot of people who want nothing more than to ram their advertising down your throat.  They don’t care a whit about you or what you represent.  They see Twitter as a free and easy way to spread their spam.  And unfortunately, their numbers are growing.

I did a search for “internet marketing” tweets using TweetDeck and clicked on the links included in the first 10 results.  Here’s what I got:

• One was a link to a mini-review for a Clickbank product.  Of course, the review favored the product and included the author’s affiliate link.  How convenient.
• Two were for a “press release” that was nothing more than a thinly-veiled sales letter for someone offering Web site design and SEO services.  Both tweets were about two minutes apart and used two different Twitter accounts.  And no, it wasn’t a retweet.
• Two were for an article about how PPC marketing is the wave of the future.  I learned more about IM from my grandmother, and she’s been dead for 15 years.  One tweet was from the guy’s Twitter account and one was from Ping.fm.
• One was nothing more than a huge ad with an opt-in form.  Apparently, I can make upwards of $2,000 a month in my spare time.  Woot!
• One was another “press release” for some guy’s new book.  If you click on his link at the bottom, you get a “coming soon” page.  It makes me wonder if he really wrote that book after all…
• One was for a blog post excerpt, which linked to another excerpt of the post, which linked to the post itself.  Then my Avast kicked in and realized there was a virus on the page — nice.  Connection terminated.
• One was for TweetLater (non-aff), a nice tool for managing your followers and enhancing your productivity on Twitter.  There is both a free version and a paid “Pro” version, and this page had a cloaked affiliate link.  But the guy took the effort to make two informative little videos on how to use TweetLater, so I give this one a thumbs up.  He mentions in the first video that it’s an affiliate link, so I liked the guy that much more.
• The last one was for an opt-in page that offered a free ebook on how not to screw up on Twitter.  It was tied in to Mark Joyner’s Simpleology thing.  Enh.

So there you have it.  Ten links, almost every one of them self-promoting garbage. Oh, and a virus as a little extra bonus.

You may be thinking that a search for “internet marketing” is going to dredge up the worst of the worst tweets because most clueless wannabe IMers conveniently leave out the “social” part of social marketing, and you’d be right.  But I can see the spam a-comin’ on all fronts.  It’s only a matter of time before you search for “grapefruit” and the majority of your tweets will be for grapefruit diet ebooks and grapefruit-flavored Viagra pills.

So what is the solution to the problem?  The obvious answer is to unfollow anyone who isn’t producing quality tweets, but that can be a full-time job when you have a huge network of followers that goes viral.  All you can really do is take the good with the bad and hope that the dark side doesn’t win.

I’m uncertain as to the future of Twitter.  Will we continue to use it when good information becomes the proverbial needle in a haystack?  If there is a way to filter out the good from the bad, then it stands a chance.  But I had the same concerns about e-mail, which I still use regularly despite the fact that my spam-to-good ratio is at least 10:1.