Well, we’ve jumped the shark at Twitter – followers are no longer connections. They’re now a commodity.
Granted, participants in social networks have always been, to some extent, a commodity. Lifehacker brought attention to a great quote found on metafilter:
if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold
I’ve been watching The case of Noah Kravitz and his former companies Twitter lawsuit against him with quite a bit of interest. You can follow the link to read all about it, but the long and short of it is that the company is claiming that Twitter followers are property that can be valued. By their valuation, my account:
is worth $22,110 a year, and by their reasoning, I could use my Twitter followers as collateral for a cheap car.
Ok, maybe not.
There was an interesting passage in the Mashable article that got me thinking:
The suit, if it goes to trial, could establish a number of precedents in the online world. “This seems to be the first case of someone legally trying to put a valuation on a follower,” notes Kravitz. And that valuation, $2.50, is significantly higher than you might expect — given that you can buy Twitter followers on eBay for less than a penny each.
I was pretty stunned at that – I didn’t know you could buy and sell followers.
I had read all the “Get Moar Followerz OMG NaO” tricks (the mass follow to Twitter Limit, wait for follow backs, dump non-follows, and then start again) but I didn’t know you could waltz on to Ebay, dump a few bucks, and get followers. I wondered if it would work and, if it did, what it would really get me.
So, I tried it. Can you buy followers? Turns out, you can.
Buying a Zombie Posse
Not wanting to hand my account’s password out left me with fewer options, and I opted for this particular sale:
I “bought it now”, paid $9.99, and within 6 hours had an email asking me for the Twitter account. I responded with my account, and 6 hours after that on New Year’s Eve, the follow notices of my plethora of new followers began rolling in. I actually got some extra followers – 569 by the end of the run, a 69 follower bonus.
Within 48 hours, my follower count had been plumped up:
and Klout was a little more impressed with me:
Only problem?
None of these followers were real people:
Most had pictures (potentially stolen from Facebook), no account had ever tweeted a single time (or not that I found from a sampling), most followed people in the 60-80 range (giving you some indication of how many people had purchased this service before), and had 3 to 5 followers. All were clearly simply fake accounts that enabled someone on Ebay to sell a follower number to people that wanted followers, but did not have them.
These fake followers, however, were clearly enough to fool Klout’s algorithm a bit despite it being patently obvious that no one gains one to two followers per minute for 4-5 hours and then suddenly stops.
I should mention that my Kred score of 723 did not move a single inch, since Kred measures engagement, not followers. Go Kred.
So why buy followers?
I likely will leave my zombie posse hanging around for a month or so as I am curious as to the affect they will have on various scoring mechanisms over a longer term, and then will take some time to block them all to see what the drop correlates to – and because it does kind of feel icky and dishonest to have them there.
It brings up very interesting questions regarding Klout and its algorithm, as well as whether you really can judge someone’s expertise by their follower count or their follow to follower ratio if it’s this easy to obtain followers to plump your numbers (as this is really the only thing that purchasing fake followers is good for). As social media achievements find their way onto resumes and get people jobs, ethical questions arise if you can so very easily purchase an accomplishment bluff.
I’ll be watching Noah’s case really closely, because if PhoneDog is right, for a $9.99 investment I just brought my Twitter account’s value from $22,110 to $39,480 a year. If they’re right, buying $1,665 worth of Ebay Twitter followers a month for a year would get me a million dollar valuation by the end of that year.
I could retire on my zombie posse! That’s the best ROI I have ever seen!
Again, not really.
And that’s why I think this case is absurd.
(For a followup to this post and to see what happened to my Klout, see http://scattershot.jenlepp.com/2012/01/buy-a-twitter-zombie-posse-get-klout/ )
