Monetizing Twitter, the ‘stream of consciousness’ and a lack of plain old common courtesy

OK, so, Twitter has given a voice to anyone capable of filling out a sign up form. This has lead to some amazing moments such as the ones you can read about here. However, it has also lead to oh so many ridiculous moments. Internally, we refer to these as ‘stream of consciousness’ or SOC. This is our term for when someone tweets any random thought that passes into their head (i.e. why have a filter when there’s Twitter?). Below is a typical example of SOC gone wrong. Someone saw one of our paid ads (promoted tweets) on twitter and decided that he felt this to be spam…

We responded by clarifying that we do not spam. We weren’t sure why he thought our ad was spam so we wanted to see if perhaps something had gone awry in twitter land. After all, it is not that uncommon for an account to get hacked and send random diet pill tweets. We wanted to be sure nothing like that had happened…

He responded by providing his definition of spam which is essentially any promoted tweet. In effect, this guy is using a free service and getting aggravated that the company who pays to provide him that service is monetizing it with the support of advertisers like us…

We (regrettably) responded with a link to the definition of promoted tweets which explains why you will see them in your twitter feed. To date, Twitter has had over $1B in funding so they need to come up with ways to achieve profitability. That seems fair enough to us and it also gives us a channel through which to advertise and drive leads…

However, our friend was not all too pleased with this explanation and was not afraid to show his true colors in his response…

Needless to say, our policy going forward will be to ignore tweets like the one at the top of the page. Trying to educate this guy on why we advertise or why Twitter needs to sell advertising was a mistake that only served to egg him on. But, this does show what happens when you give some people a voice. Common courtesy goes out the window. Darn shame.

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