Twitter can be gamed too? Who would have thought? If there is a way to get promotion from a popular social site, you know that it will be taken advantage of. It just becomes a matter of competition at some point, perhaps even with people being paid to help with that promotion (right Diggers?).
Why would we think that Twitter is above this? Well, their announcement a month ago about cracking down on spam would be one indication, but honestly, who really thought that this type of behavior would be eliminated?
The CareerBuilder Model
Svetlana Gladkova at Profy has uncovered what appears to be CareerBuilder “gaming” its way into Twitter’s “Trending Topics” and search results (actually our own Susan Coppersmith noticed it a while back as well and twittered about it [you can follow her here.]). Gladkova noticed that a lot of searches using Twitter Search (formerly Summize) would turn up results with CareerBuilder in the top ten. Her curiosity was piqued when no recent big CareerBuilder news was evident. Why would the brand come up so frequently? Gladkova writes:
The answer proved to be very simple – CareerBuilder generated all the activity required to make the name of the site the most discussed topic on Twitter on its own. The thing is that the guys behind the website simply configured a few Twitter accounts (each account focused on a particular city) to broadcast all the latest job positions advertised on CareerBuilder automatically to Twitter. This resulted in a few dozens of new tweets posted to a few timelines belonging to different CareerBuilder geographical sections every hour (as I believe they must have some moderation for new jobs where they approve new postings to the site in bulk).
“I also suspect that these tweets are posted using some sort of a script as they show ‘from web’ as the posting method while normally when we see such automatic tweets published via RSS we see ‘from Twitterfeed’ there.”
First of all, does this not fall into Twitter’s definition of spam? Last month the company said it was hiring workers specifically to keep spam under control. Apart from that, they would suspend offending accounts, and provide community-powered alerts to help bring offenders to their attention. They did note however, “As always, fighting spam is a sustained activity. There is no magic wand we can wave or switch we can flip to make it all go away.” Secondly, what is to stop everybody else from doing the same thing, rendering Twitter Search and Trending Topics virtually useless?
It would be one thing if CareerBuilder’s listings were coming up in searches for say, “jobs, los angeles”, rather than just “los angeles” and appearing as five of the top ten results. Then again, you have to criticize Twitter’s search algorithm as well.
The Real Issue
But algorithms aside, this is really just an example of a much bigger issue. This type of thing happens all the time with social sites across the board, and there seems to be no easy solution. Sites allowing stuff like this to happen are giving social media marketing a bad name. Any social media marketing enthusiast will tell you, the best way to market via social networks/social bookmarking sites, is through conversation and relationships.
Yet the opposite seems to be true for what is really happening. I discussed earlier this month what was going on at Digg, as revealed by an interview with an anonymous “top digger” at Invesp. Now that StumbleUpon is dropping the toolbar-only approach, they’re going to be attracting a lot of new users, so the “gaming” will likely increase there as well. I’ve always loved StumbleUpon’s service for the sheer quality of results obtained from its search tool, but part of me wonders if that is a product of its limited use due to the toolbar factor. If the usage increases tremendously, so might the spam (if you wish to call it that).
The fact that it is such an issue also leads me to wonder just how much success the “gaming” parties are actually achieving with these methods. Are the guys paying people to “digg” their stories truly reaping tremendous rewards? Is CareerBuilder gaining a whole lot of excess traffic thanks to a script flooding Twitter with job tweets?
Considering the popularity of a site like Twitter, I’m curious to know the percentage of Tweets rolling in on Twitter’s new election page coming directly from the candidates’ campaign staffs. It would certainly provide a much easier venue for hiding behind lies. See more of what Gladkova has to say on the matter in the comments.
There’s no denying that so called “new media” has had a huge impact on how people get their news. The pros and cons are the subject of ongoing debate throughout the Internet and the blogosphere. Though I have personally defended new media (specifically blogs) as a legitimate source of news, it is behavior like this that tends to favor the other side of the coin. I still think new media is legitimate, but social sites need to reallly come up with solutions to keep results from being too polluted. It defeats the purpose. If people want to know what others are “twittering” about, they don’t want to see what one source is “twittering” about itself. If they want to see what’s popular on Digg, they want to see what people actually like. Not what people were paid to like.
