It’s straight out of the movies. Mindless mobs of people, dead to the world hobbling around trying to eat your brains. That’s right, zombies have made their way to Twitter.
As my friend Freddy Nager outlines in his post “Hypocritical Mass: The Big Lie About Twitter” people have become obsessed with numbers on Twitter. This obsession is to the point that they can’t pay any attention to people who are trying to get their attention. Kind of like how a zombie can only focus on eating brains.
Worse, and even more zombie like than this is a recent behavioral trend that I’ve noticed, the zombie linker. They often have 5-6 thousand followers (which is mostly just a group of all the same auto-follow people) and they’ve resorted to using Twitterfeed (or a similar source) to cheat and look like they’re really active posting links. They’ll hook up Twitterfeed to CNN or Mashable or some other source (often a source that gets ReTweeted (RT’d) frequently) and then they walk away. Their streams become mindless zombie parrots of these blogs and news sites. Seriously? If I wanted to see all of CNNs stories I’d subscribe to their RSS or Twitter. I don’t know about you/them but I’m on Twitter for the personal connections and becoming a zombie so you can pretend that you’re pushing out useful/helpful information is just total BULL. If you don’t have the time to really connect with me on Twitter (or any other social media) then don’t bother. The reality is that those 5-6 thousand people are doing the same thing to appear valuable just like you and now you’re just 1 in a crowd instead of a unique person that shares unique links and has conversations. I know that you only have so much time and you’ve got real things you need to do in order to make money. We all understand that you can’t tweet 24/7.
Bottom line, if you’re not willing to invest in a personal connection with me why are you wasting your time and mine?
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a problem with using TwitterFeed to hook up your personal blog and that sort of thing. I think that services like this should require proof of ownership of the feed before they let you use it. Of course then someone will just write another service or app that let’s people cheat. So how do we stop it? We have to educate people on how to spot deceptive techniques like the zombie. It’s the same with fighting spam, spammers will continue to spam us until we have educated people on how to report them and discern who/what is spam. Once we’ve made it to that level they’ll be forced to find new ways to deceive us or get real jobs. It’s sorta like 28 days where all the zombies pretty much die off.
So how do you spot these fakers? Here’s some examples of people not to follow:
- Has more tweets in their stream posted from TwitterFeed or API than from other clients.
- Has a very low number of @replies in their stream, or none at all.
- Seems to only post quotes of other people with no context.
- Has a very close follow ratio (5000/5100) or says they auto follow everyone. That means they’re not paying attention to you and they don’t expect that you’ll really pay any attention to them.
- Every other link that they post has a number in it, 50 Best This, 10 Great That. Odds are they’re just cherry picking articles from around the web that they know will get RT’d. (Not to pick on Guy Kawasaki but we only need one of him & he will respond to you unlike many people that try to copy him).
How do you find someone that’s a good choice to follow if you’re trying to make new connections? Introduce yourself. Anyone who takes the time to respond to you personally (and adds value to your Twitter stream) is very likely worth following.
Don’t automate your Twitter! We already have enough zombie robots to talk to, I’ll just call the phone company or the cable company if I want to talk to zombie robots. Use common sense. Would you go to a party full of zombies? How about if the party was just a bunch of people on their phones instead of talking and connecting with each other? Can you imagine going to a networking event with a bunch of answering machines?
What’s your take? Do you mind automated feeds or basically cheating like this or does it bug you as much as it does me?
