Jeremiah Tolbert

Twitter is fast becom­ing a pim­ple on the back­side of my social net­work­ing life. It’s always been an odd thing, under attack by spam­mers of the tra­di­tional sort as well as non­tra­di­tional. I block social media experts, SEO experts, and porn stars on a daily basis. They don’t care what I have to say, they just want to sell me stuff. Twitter’s a great way to share things, but straight-​​up prod­uct pitch­ing has been really get­ting on my nerves.

But in the past month, I’ve noticed an even more unset­tling trend on Twitter. I am not going to be polite about how I describe this. I’m call­ing this twhor­ing. A lot of other activ­ity on twit­ter has been assigned this term, but this is a bet­ter sub­ject for that descriptor.

What is Twhoring and Twimping?

Twhoring is hap­pily advertising/​spamming prod­uct names as hash tags to your entire fol­low­ers list for the off-​​chance that you might win some piece of tech. Twhoring ranks lower than actu­ally adver­tis­ing or pros­ti­tu­tion because adver­tis­ers and pros­ti­tutes actu­ally get paid for what they do. Twhores tweet away with a slim chance of get­ting any­thing for their pub­lic­ity efforts.

The same sort of peo­ple who will com­plain about ads on a web­site or on a TV show seem to lose their senses when pre­sented with an easy oppor­tu­nity to “win” a Apple prod­uct. You might think you’re clever and start tag­ging the hash­tag to every one of your tweets. This is what the twimps like Boxyspace and Moonballz want you to do. Strut their stuff, spread their brand­ing far and wide. Maybe if you’re lucky they’ll give you a snack cake. A Twinkie perhaps?

It doesn’t help that I loathe both com­pa­nies involved in twimp­ing out their prod­ucts with twhores. “Build your own web­site” com­pa­nies gen­er­ally offer shoddy prod­ucts and com­pete with pro­fes­sional designer/​developers such as myself. No drag and drop sys­tem is going to build you a bet­ter web­site than some­one who has done it for years. And if it does, then you’re prob­a­bly a designer your­self and you didn’t need their soft­ware any­way. But that’s beside the point.

You may think that tag­ging your posts once and a while doesn’t do any harm, but when every­one on Twitter is doing it, it becomes old real quick. There for a while this week, I’d say 30% of the tweets I saw had MoonBallz attached to it. It’s like a twitterly-​​transmitted dis­ease. It spreads rapidly, and it makes you ooze mar­ket­ing pus.

Disinfect your­self, my friends. Stop being a twhore and start hold­ing out for some­thing of real value, at the very least. This isn’t a con­test you’re par­tic­i­pat­ing in, it’s a unnat­ural viral mar­ket­ing cam­paign that makes the par­tic­i­pants look gullible.

Too many peo­ple I respect have fallen prey to this. You are giv­ing it away, folks. Value your brand. It’s worth more than a laptop.

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Tags: social media, thwore, twimp, twitter, viral marketing