Tweeting for dollars

If you’re on the Twitters-dot-com, you’ll have noticed their craptastic new revenue-generating capability: “promoted” tweets.

For whatever amount of money (look it up if you care; I don’t), you can have one of your tweets appear in some algorithm-determined number of people’s timelines, whether or not they follow you. (Apparently you can pay to have them appear for a long time, because I’ve seen some that originated last year. Don’t they understand that tweets, like fish, go off after a few days?) Basically, it’s like TV commercials, because they interrupt the flow of the nonsense you already have signed up to get, by virtue of following people.

Actually, it’s like TV commercials from the last century, precisely because they show up in the timelines of people who have neither need for nor interest in your product, and all you do is piss them off. (Like high school kids and garage bands being offered great deals on Siemens infrastructure or call center solutions.)

And Twitter is exactly the platform for people to express their pissed-offedness.

For example: this promoted tweet from Grey Goose, inviting folks to “engage” with these ESPY awards. (Yeah, right—no idea, and no desire to investigate.) So between the product and the honoree, we struck gold with the first two responses.

Then there was this one from…well, dunno, really. The White House? The Conference on Aging? The Society for Honoring Lots of Stuff?

Again, the first two responses are just stellar.

Twitter is obviously making money off this crap, so it’s not going to stop. In the meantime, as I’m blocking the hell out of these twits, I do enjoy watching the pushback.