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Don’t Damage Your Brand as a Marketing Twhore

Filed Under: SF Business, Web Design, creativity

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.

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

POSTED: 8:30 am Mon July 06 2009 |