I don’t know who’s managing the District 9 twitter marketing campaign, but their abuse of twitter (via their creation of Twam – “twitter spam”) just caused me to decide not to go see the movie tonight. Here’s the history of the experience.
On August 15th, I tweeted “has anyone seen District 9? Worth it?” I got a handful of generally positive responses including one that said "@bfeld district 9 was very good. stylistically a bit reminiscent of 28 Days Later. well done and entertaining. also, go see hurt locker.” I didn’t recognize the handle of the person that tweeted it to me but I noticed it since it was more descriptive than others.
Over the past three days I’ve now gotten over 20 tweets from people I don’t recognize that say exactly the same thing. For example, I just got one from Joanne ODonnell (apedvatu). I don’t know Joanne (if she even exists) and her twitter account is garbage.
Or how about the tweet from Dominique Arnold. Exactly the same text. Same drill – no clue who Dominique is and her tweets are a bunch of district 9 crap.
This is classic marketing spam. No different than all the email garbage we get every day (that a whole industry has been created to deal with). To date, Twitter has done a great job of dealing with twam but it’ll logically get worse, especially now that all you need to be a “social media consultant” is a twitter account.
As I was writing this, I saw a tweet pop up on a TechCrunch article titled “You’re Doing It Wrong Part 348: Complete And Utter PR FAIL” I think the dynamics around social media marketing are now going to get a lot worse now before it settles down.
Guess I’m going to see Julie & Julia tonight instead of District 9. Amy told me that District 9 looks too scary for me anyway.