Posts Tagged ‘wired’

One news story in particular caught my eye this week. Robert McMillan wrote an article for Wired about a man who created a Twitter bot that people actually like. Back in 2008 Greg Marra created @trackgirl as an experiment to see if she could infiltrate a network of real people; in particular, runners.

The Twitter script was designed to scour Twitter for running related tweets and copy and paste these as her own words. She also followed 5 running-related individuals per day and followed back anyone who followed her. This alone is considered good Twitter etiquette – and she wasn’t annoying anyone with porn-y content or faster than lightening responses and re-tweets.

What’s interesting about this particular bot is the reaction to one tweet about twisting her ankle. People started to DM her asking how the recovery was going and showing genuine concern. All studies in human empathy aside, this could be of genuine interest to brands.

According to Corp Comms, around one quarter of Italian and International Brands Twitter followers are actually Twitter bots, which can significantly increase a brands perceived social media standing. So what if brands were able to use Twitter bots to infiltrate their target audience and spread some subtle marketing messages?

We’re all pretty well versed in how to spot a Twitter bot, but @trackgirl was able to work around this by infiltrating one particular community. If she had been created by Nike, she could have spent time tweeting about her running endeavours, and then casually slipped in a tweet about her new Nike running shoes. Not only did the experiment prove that she could infiltrate running circles, just it also showed that people actually cared what she was tweeting about.

This raises a huge number of legal and ethical questions about the use of twitter bots to create social influence, but if the Twitter bot was using Tweets that were already in the Twitter-sphere, would the use of a bot to promote a brand really be that bad? On the one hand it would simply be a case of aggregating positive brand messages, and on the other it would be deception of a brands’ audience on a mass scale.

In the past we’ve seen the ill-effects of Twitter bots getting involved with politics as they were used to bolster and spread positive messages during the Mexican presidential election. While this technology could spell good news for brands, it would be one step closer to taking the ‘social’ out of ‘social media’.

Would you feel duped if you discovered a twitter user you were following was a bot? And how would you feel if they were spreading marketing messages? 

Following on from the Pinterest dilemma, which shows no signs of being resolved any time soon, we have to ask: does the Internet need a standardised code to ensure credit is given where credit is due? If the code was universally recognised and widely used, then finding the original source of shared content would be a cinch.

With blogging, micro-blogging, content sharing and content curation being the current “big thing” in internet trends, BrainPickings.com founder Maria Popova has proposed we use icons to clearly show where we found the content we’re sharing and curating.

The two symbols ᔥ and ↬ represent a ‘via’ and a ‘hat tip’, both of which are widely established terms used by bloggers and internet folk alike.

A via link shows that you found the content directly, so this would be used if you post an image on your blog, or use a quote from a press release.

via: Wired.co.uk

The hat tip symbol would be utilised to demonstrate an indirect link, where the content you are sharing is derivative of an original source. So if you used a blog post as the starting off point for your own post, you would attribute it with a hat tip.

Again, I reiterate that these are already established and widely used terms within the blogging community. So, why does Popova assert that we need to use the symbols?

In reality, Popova is just highlighting that more needs to be done to ensure content is correctly and fairly attributed; the symbols and the fancy website are just placeholders for this message.

In a blog post she writes:

“The Curator’s Code is an effort to keep this whimsical rabbit hole open by honoring discovery through an actionable code of ethics — first, understanding why attribution matters, and then, implementing it across the web in a codified common standard, doing for attribution of discovery what Creative Commons has done for image attribution.” ᔥ

The suggestion that we need such a code has angered some, with Mashable’s Christina Warren tweeting:

“The Curator’s Code is the most idiotic, histrionic and self-serving pseudo ideal I’ve seen in a long time.”

And later:

“And for the record, I via like a mofo, I don’t need some lamea** symbol.”

Her discontent is understandable; the suggestion that we need a Curator’s Code is the equivalent of accusing bloggers of not being fair in content crediting.

So, fellow bloggers, are you doing your bit to keep your content fairly attributed? And how do you feel about being told you should be using a specific symbol to make sure you’re doing it right?