"I'm back in business but flooded with a cete of badgers = commercial followers," we twittered this morning (see below for details). Speaking of badgers, one thing led to another in the course of twitter banter, and we ended up at this morsel of Aesopian wisdom that they aren't teaching in public schools anymore, from Fable LII, "The Fox and the Badger": "Like other dealers in untruth, the Fox had not invented what he had said: he had told parts of the facts, and by his manner of telling them, he had led the Badger to misapply them, and draw undue conclusions." WH chief of staff Rahm Emanuel's "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste" comes to mind. (John Connor Press Associates photo)
"I literally doubled my followers every day all day until I was in the Top 200 Most Followed in the world," goes the "testimonial" at Hummingbird, "The Pro Twitter Marketing Tool" — AKA a "twitter automation tool" — that we found flitting about in our Site Meter stats this morning. Could they be the ones who had hijacked our account yesterday, getting us temporarily suspended by twitter? Hummingbird's get-rich-quick sales pitch :
It was painful to see, yet another amazing internet market place, dominated by just a few "top" companies with an unlimited war chest to throw around. I spent hundreds of hours studying these Twitter Power Users and discovered every single trick they employed to generate literally thousands of new followers a day …
I took what I had learned and began developing a software program that quickly and easily distilled all of these secrets into a simple, easy to use tool that would literally auto-pilot me to the top of Twitter.
The Hummingbird folks are asking the fool to part with a mere $197 in return for untold riches. There's one born every minute. We put two and two together this morning when we noticed our email being flooded with new followers already boasting tens of thousands of followers. We're keeping our eye out for these pound-foolish would-be followers and summarily blocking them as they "poor" in.
Update: Final thought. While things are more or less under control, we've still got the nuisance factor of having to individually block each of these would-be followers. Next step, a twitter help ticket to find out how we can get these weasels out of our den.
I would still like to know what the dangerous message was and sue for false statements.
Posted by: goomp | May 31, 2009 at 11:58 AM
Unfortunately what you want to do is not easy as far as I know. First - you can lock down your account so only those you approve can see it and then they have to request to follow you. This means your tweets are no longer public, but does keep out the riff-raff. ;-)
The only other thing is to go through and block those you don't want following. A tedious tedious process. I don't know of any other way. If twitter does have a suggestion, I'd be interested to know about it.
It's too bad they can't leave the feed public but put in a "request to follow" type of thing where everyone can see your feed, but has to request to follow you. Then you can approve or ban before it becomes a problem.
But so far as I know - the only way to get the "request to follow" is to make your feed private. So it's difficult all around. *sigh*
Posted by: Teresa | May 31, 2009 at 12:53 PM
Testing testing 1 2 3... heh
Posted by: Teresa | May 31, 2009 at 10:46 PM
*sigh* might be a cookie issue - or not. The testing comment went thru fine. Then got blocked again. Feel free to delete the extra comments Sissy!
Posted by: Teresa | May 31, 2009 at 10:58 PM