TweepleBlog

Not long ago a new service was presented to the Twitterverse.  Magpie, served out of Be-a-magpie.com.  This new service first analyzes your Twitter account, and then tells you what your friends / followers network should be worth if you “monetize” it.

This is one of the worst cases of not getting it I’ve run across so far on Twitter. I follow quite a few people, and I enjoy it.  I have my core group of regulars that I interact with regularly (yes, HP, we figured that out without an exhaustive Thinktank) but I watch the stream of tweets created by the others I follow and make an effort to interact with new people daily.  Sometimes they jump into the core group.  Sometimes their tweets lead me to new profiles - people they are interacting with.  Sometimes they are junk.

I hate junk.  I hate it in my mailbox, my e-mail inbox, my fax machine tray, underneath my windshield wipers in parking lots, and I hate it in Twitter.  I don’t like most commercials on TV or inane banter on the radio, but I have little control over those…I can give up what I like to get rid of what I don’t like, but that’s hardly satisfying.

With Twitter, it’s different.  If I’m irritated by a Tweetstream, I can cancel the channel and add a new one.  This is where my take on Magpie comes in.  It’s a very, very bad idea.

Twitter is about personal connections.  Even those accounts that serve as marketing tools for their owners are marketing the people that created them.  Magpie puts someone else’s advertisement in your tweet.  Whether or not you endorse whatever is being advertised, you are now associated with it.

I won’t (yet) unfollow a person I enjoy because they run magpie ads, but here’s a little formula for you.  You have so many tweets a day to interest followers.  If you are really clever, really important, or people have a burning need to hear what you have to say, you can get away with a lot. Most of us don’t fall in that category.  Most of us have to earn our followers, and if you filter out 2 out of every ten tweets by inserting ads that no one is going to click on anyway, you have dropped your interesting tweet ratio by twenty percent.  That’s going to make people think about what to do about your account.

I’m not the only one that thinks it’s a bad idea.  @Steven_Sanders put up Don’t-be-a-magpie.com - just a link you can send people if they run magpie adds in their tweets.  @designmeme posted a script that you can run that filters out magpie adverts : Scarecrow: Ad Blocking Script for Twitter. A lot of people have declared they will just unfollow anyone who posts magpie ads.

If you have something you want to market / pimp / push on Twitter, make me care about you, and then interest me in your product / service, whatever.  If you push ads in my face, the odds are I’ll get irritated and just go away.  Personally, I just @ people back who use magpie and say “STOP IT” - now I may add Steven’s don’t-be-a-magpie link onto that.

There may well be some unobtrusive way to advertise through Twitter someday, but corrupting  your posts with ad copy is not the answer.  Your posts are the coin of the realm in the Twitterverse.  Don’t devalue them.

@David_N_Wilson

@Tweepleblog