In a short video interview with WebWorkerDaily (posted below), entrepreneur/marketer/ex-Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki shares his favorite web application. What’s interesting is that it’s a tool most of us would never have heard of, it’s a Twitter app called Twitter Hawk.
The application uses Twitter Search to automatically source particular terms, and when mentioned, sends automated tweets directing people to a particular site.
In Guy’s interview, the Alltop founder, uses the example of someone mentioning “Fashion Week” in a tweet. Guy will then have Twitter Hawk set up to tweet that person reminding them that they can learn all about fashion at http://fashion.alltop.com.
The question is, is it spam? Is setting up an automated process to tweet people who mention a topic that your site could help them with…spam? Is it spam if it wasn’t automated? You can see the alltop Twitter account here, judge for yourself.
Amazing!!!
Great post! I have mixed feelings about this. I think the definition of spam should evolve along with the medium. I would love to see how many people blocked him after being spammed. If they decided to follow him instead, would that still be spam or would that be great marketing?
The rules of engagement on Twitter are still being defined and I have no doubt, we’ll see more of this as the site evolves.
I won’t call this SPAM, unless they start sending direct messages to my inbox any kind of (mail, twitter, facebook whatever) their stream is their decision and I am NOT obliged to subscribe it that is my OWN decision!
A response from company. http://www.twitterhawk.com/faq/spam
I think it depends on if you think an @ or DM message is the same as an e-mail.
If it smells like spam, then it’s spam! This is turning twitter into a ghetto! Hate it, thanks for showing your cards.
Great Find!
Yes – he is spamming people and that is why I un-followed him.
I don’t consider Guy’s Tweets spam since I opted to follow him. In fact, I actually appreciate being notified that Alltop has information I might not have known about. Two such cases I can think of are when I received Tweets that Alltop featured articles from the Christian Science Monitor and NPR.
Now, I wouldn’t want to receive continual Tweets on the same subject, but so far this hasn’t happened. That said, I consider Twitter Hawk an excellent, targeted marketing tool that could be – if Guy has proprietary rights to the software – a glittering pot of gold in and of itself. :-)
Sorry. It’s spam. I don’t mind if you have an automated search that points you to people asking questions, but an automated response is tasteless spam.
Of course, it is spam.
Just imagine this scale, and every company track your every mention of a word ‘related’ to their product, then @reply you.
“You just mentioned ‘thirst’ in a tweet. Why don’t you visit coke.com ?”
That would be the end of twitter.
Since it’s possible, it is likely to happen. :-(
i don’t really consider this spam. the problem will be when twitter has 50 million people on it. good posts will be really hard to find, unless they create more powerful filtering.
It is certainly not “permission marketing” as championed by Seth Godin
SPAM + Twitter = SPITTER
Could this be the downfall of Twitter, at the hands of marketers?
Lol, amazing??
You don’t need to be following someone on twitter to be spammed by them. Most people track the @replies and that’s where these tweets are going..not into dm’s.