My coworker, Alex, posted the following tweet today referencing our fried chicken taste-off planned for tomorrow:
Setting up the rules for fast food fried chicken taste-off in the office tomorrow.
To which, Popeyes Chicken chimed in with:
Note that Alex did not mention Popeyes or @PopeyesChicken in any way. He only mentions fried chicken which must have popped up on their radar via a service like Summize or TweetScan.
Other companies such as H&R Block, Southwest Airlines, Comcast, and Zappos are actively engaging consumers, whether they’re customers or not in some cases, on Twitter. H&R Block apparently responds to people asking general tax questions, including questions about donations and the recent economic stimulus checks. Southwest wishes their travelers a safe flight as well as responds to complaints and compliments that are directed toward ’southwest’ or ‘SWA’.
Most of these tweets are unsolicited. But does that automatically make them spam?
This led to an interesting discussion among my coworkers as to whether or not this type of engagement qualifies as SPAM. I maintain that, at this point, it does not. In this case the message does not go into your timeline or direct messages, email inbox, et cetera… However, it does show up in your Replies tab (when it’s working!), but is that spam? Really that’s a recently added feature of Twitter to help you see when other people whom you may not follow mention you in their tweets.
So, what say you? If a company is being helpful, is it spam? What if they respond with some sort of promotional message? Who draws the line?
For a list of other companies on Twitter, check out this Twitter Brand Index from Fluent Simplicity.
Update 05.30.2008:
I’ve got to update this post because Popeyes is obviously very engaged online. This morning I saw this reply, referencing this very blog post, in my Twitter feed:
@atxryan Spam is pork, not chicken right? I’m respectively interested in your findings.
This is interesting because I never mention any of the aforementioned keywords in any of my tweets. Meaning that our anonymous Popeyes social media guru discovered this post via Google Alerts or something similar and now humorously engaged me via Twitter, even completing the circle with Alex:
@alexcc Good morning. I hope ya’ll have fun in the taste off today. Is Ryan a judge?
I salute you, anonymous Popeyes social media guru.
Comments
2 Comments so far. Comments are closed.It all depends on the nature and content of the reply. If it’s a genuine response from a real person, then it’s much harder to call it spam in my opinion. In this case, the fact that Popeye’s responded in a way that shows they actually read Alex’s tweet and responded with passion. I wish I had that level of service when I go to one of their stores.
Zappos is a great example of a company that gets it. It’s insane how many of their employees actively use Twitter, which includes their CEO. They’re tinkering with this experiment and blazing some cool trails along the way.
The very nature of Twitter encourages open communication from people or organizations who may not know each other directly. In the examples you listed above, the companies were actually being helpful, which I think rocks, and I for one, would love to see this type of use and participation grow.
That said, spammer’s have found holes, and will likely find or create more, and some companies try to use Twitter for purely promotional means. In both cases the folks behind Twitter, and those of us who use it will need to step up in varying degrees to combat the misuse.
The difference is that spammers are not solving problems–they are just offering unsolicited service. As long as Twitter users do not respond to spammers, the spammers will see it as a waste of time.
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