Swooping

I am personally torn on this topic.

In the spirit of brevity, I’ll approach this question voter’s pamphlet style:

Question: Shall marketers be permitted to use Twitter to forward information about special offers they are promoting?

Argument in favor:

Yes. Twitter is in effect a “double opt-in” system in email parlance. First, a potential sender of the marketing message has to agree to the idea of sending the tweet in the first place. If a sender deems a marketing message not appropriate for their audience, they don’t have to agree to send it. Indeed the sender must press the “Update” button themselves. Second, any potential recipient must have opted-in to follow others whose tweets will appear on their respective Twitter feeds. If a recipient thinks a received tweet is inappropriately spammy, they can simply block further inbound tweets from the sender.

Additionally, this fits Twitter’s mission statement pretty well: the idea of trusted relations sharing knowledge and what they’re doing at any given moment.

Argument in opposition:

No. Twitter is not for marketers. If it becomes loaded up with marketing messages, it will become irrelevant and annoying, and will wither. No one who signs up to follow another person on Twitter does so expecting that they will start receiving even occasional canned third party marketing pitches from that followed individual.

The spirit of Twitter is to offer a mechanism by which friends or associates can provide the answer to – quoting Twitter’s mission statement here – “one simple question: What are you doing?” Appropriate answers might be “I’m at a club hearing this great band” [link to club address] or “I’m reading this awesome book [link to description] or EVEN “I just found a great deal on Mac software [link to MacHeist.com].”

Twitter is a forum by which individuals voluntarily share information. Paying people to spread your message is one thing. Paying people to slap an ad banner in their friends’ Twitter feed is akin to paying someone to sneak up behind their friend and put an advertisement for a product on their back without their permission. Twitter is not a place for marketers to offer this kind of chicanery.

How do I vote?

My first instinct was from my gut: No. I thought about why I felt that way, and started making associations with my time at the helm of a 1999 email newsletter when confronted with the idea of sprinkling ads in with my content. “They signed up to read content, not ads.” A truism. But look where we are now, 9 years later. Pretty much all email newsletters have at least one ad. I personally have designed ads, placed them, and bought them. When I see them in newsletters to which I subscribe, I may or may not look at them, but am almost never insulted by their presence.

Likewise with my Twitter client, Twitteriffic. The free version is ad-supported. The first time I saw that ad, I was surprised and a little appalled. Now it’s more of a game to rate them. Sometimes. Or not. Whatever.

MacHeist did not dictate what should be said. Yes their scheme pre-populated the Update box on my Twitter page with suggested text and the requisite link, but there was nothing saying I couldn’t change that text. I read it, looked over my list of followers to determine if I thought any of them would be really offended, weighed that against how much I wanted Delicious Library, considered if any of my followers might want the MacHeist bundle, and fired away.

Twitter is an open conduit for information flow. Its user community is discerning. It is as easy to block someone as it is to follow them.

An analogy I thought of in the Your Mac Live IRC chat the other night:

Guy: “Hey kid, do you want a cookie?”

Kid: “Of course I want a cookie!”

Guy: “Ok, to get this cookie, you have to put nipple clamps on your friend and shock them.”

Kid: “Uh, dude. That’s not cool.”

Guy: “Ok listen, it’s a REALLY GOOD cookie. And it’s just a little shock. Not only that, but your friend can also have a cookie if he or she agrees to the same deal! Seem fair?”

Kid: “A really good cookie, eh? All right! I’m in!”