David Gerzof

Can an Organization Own a #HashTag?

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 15:25:38 -0500

A few weeks ago I was preparing for class and was reviewing the Emerson Social Media #ESM hashtag stream, when I suddenly got flooded with a ton of #ESM tweets that were not part of our class or even the Emerson community. At first I thought it was students from the fall semester, but I recognize most of their handles and figured this was something else; turns out there was a weekend course running titled “Experts of Social Media”.

Now I don’t consider myself an expert on social media, I experiment with it - a lot; I explore it from a marketing perspective in our Emerson Social Media class, but I don’t claim to be an expert - In truth I kind of make fun of self-proclaimed “social media experts,” mainly because there are so many of them and less one percent of them truely understand that it’s about building and participating in community, NOT about getting a million followers or relentlessly blasting out updates. (Click here if you want to see a social media expert in its natural habitat)

Being that I’m not a social media expert, I didn’t know what do when I realized that some other group was muddying up our #ESM Hashtag stream. I could have been conservative and wrote to Twitter asking for guidance, but the last time I wrote them it took almost two months for them to get back to me (something having to do with exponential growth). I could have gone full-guns-nuclear and launched the might of 60 Emerson Social Media students armed to the teeth with Twitter APIs at this other ESM. Instead I opted to fire off a stern, but polite tweet across their bow; it read “Thank you for pushing #ESM hastag = Emerson Social Media = if you’re not part of the Emerson Mafia you might want to find your own hashtag”.

In the end it took this tweet and the efforts of a single #ESM student on Jon Bounds’ blog to resolve the issue - Experts of Social Media are now #EOSM.

The interesting story here is not the battle itself, but as Jon points out: our “desire to own and organize” hashtags. There was no recourse for the Emerson Social Media class but to directly confront this other ESM using social media platforms. There is no ownership of hastags and if ther was how would Twitter enforce them? Twitter does not offer verified hashtag accounts and it provides no support for these sort of hashtag conflicts. While it may seem petty or silly to battle over a hashtag, I can now see why communities that rely on a specific hashtag get so upset when some else hijacks it. As more organizations and communities adopt hashtag use, they will develop a similar feeling of ownership over “their” hashtag the same way Emerson Social Media feels about #ESM and as a consequence, passionately defend it. It’s ironic that the hashtag, which helps like-minded people find each other and anchors an organization in the Twitter stream, can also be the source of conflict between online communities.

How to Sniff Out a Twitter Robot Posing as a Human

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 15:11:34 -0500

I was speaking on threats to Twitter in this past week’s #ESM Emerson Social Media class and it occurred to me that Twitter’s biggest internal threat is not people tweeting inane things that best belong on Facebook, but rather something much more annoying and far worse – the multitude of robots passing themselves off as humans on Twitter. I’ve noticed over the past year that the robots have been multiplying at such a fast pace that they could someday possibly out number humans on Twitter, rendering the platform virtually useless.

Let’s be clear on what a Twitter robot is – A fully automated Twitter handle that usually has a human face for an avatar, but is more like a fishing lure than anything else. Using automated follow services like TweetAdder, TweetWhistle or TweetSpinner, a robot will automatically follow other Twitter handles based on preset keywords the robot is programmed to follow. The idea is to stimulate these Twitter handles to reciprocate the follow, building a Twitter following. If a Twitter handle doesn’t reciprocate a follow after a set amount of time, a rule is triggered that has the robot automatically unfollow non-reciprocating handles.
If this was all a robot did they’d be super easy to spot – they would appear to follow a ton of people and have a slightly lower number of followers with very few tweets. But most people who set up Robots understand this and take their robot an extra step by adding in a feed API like Twitterfeed, which on schedule grabs recent posts from a single or multiple sites and spits them out as tweets, making the robot look like a member of the Twitter community.

So how to sniff out a Robot?

Here’s a few Robot types I’ve found and ways to identify them:

1)    The Simple TweetFeeder – The tweets from this account will all be the same with a shortened link and will look like someone stamped out all their tweets.

2)    Skippy the Scratched CDbot – Probably the easiest robot to spot – this account will tweet the same thing multiple times – probably because whoever set it up double input the autotweet request.

3)    The Scheduler – a variation on a TweetFeeder , this robot tweets out the same number of tweets at the same time everyday. Often times throwing out so many tweets so fast that no human could possible type and tweet at that speed – a sure give away.

4)    The Wall Flower – This robot has no feed but has thousands of followers, is following slightly more people than has following it and has zero or very few tweets

5)    The Complex TweetFeeder – To not appear like a Simple TweetFeeder or Scheduler, this robot uses a mix of automated tweet applications to look more varied. These robots are a bit harder to spot, but the tell tale sign they are a robot is there will be no @ messages going out to anyone.

Got a different type of Robot to report? tweet me at: http://twitter.com/davidgerzof and I’ll add it to the list with a credit to you.

Pls follow @MABeacon if you’re interested in Boston or Massachusetts politics