The Invisible Twitter Man

[Warren Sukernek]

An interesting controversy on Twitter today. Matt Bacak, anyone ever hear of him? – Exactly - self released a press release calling himself, The Powerful Promoter, “First Facebook, now Twitter. The Powerful Promoter, Matt Bacak, has taken himself to the top of the social media networks yet again, this time beating out 99.9% of the fastest growing site's members”. As you would expect, the Twitterverse has not been kind. Scott Baird, describes the reaction in his blog, Matt’s press release states “Anyone can call their promotional abilities ‘powerful’ but I actually prove that mine are,”. “The problem is that this type of ego really contradicts the the overall social media mentality which is basically “It’s not about you, it’s about the overall community”.

You can see the backlash through Twittersearch. Bacak has been called the Biggest Douche in Social Media and 232 people have dugg the article with 69 comments at this time. Jamie Scheu described the situation well on his blog, Promote Your Way to Irrevocable Personal Humiliation.

As humiliating as this situation may be, it points out the problem with our obsession with keeping score. Matt Bacak wrote a press release because he got a high Twittergrader score.

How does a guy who follows just 32 people with 1500 updates and most importantly, no one knows, get such a high score? As you can see, Bacak is so memorable that real Top Twitterer, Aaron Brazell, calls him Joe. Maybe the wizards at Twittergrader need to go back to Hogwarts. How can you give a person that no one on Twitter knows a 99.9! Aside from the grade inflation or algorithm problems, I think what the Invisible Twitter Man points out is the problem with ego and score obsession in social media. Hopefully, we can get back to Scott Baird’s point and let social media be about the overall community.

Originally posted on Twittermaven.com

[Vincent Wright]

PERFECT, Warren! He follows 32 people and gets a 99.9? That PROVES the TwitterGrader algorithm is BROKEN! (or worse: meaningless.)

[Warren Sukernek]

Vincent, I agree with you. Mike Volpe of Hubspot commented on my blog:

Twitter Grade is a number. It's based on:
- The number of followers you have
- The power of this network of followers
- The pace of your updates
- The completeness of your profile

So apparently, number of people you follow is not a big factor in Twittergrader. However, in actual Twitter usage, it certainly is.

Thanks,

[Vincent Wright]

Um, Warren,
I don't care one thing about that pretender to the Twitter throne but, I do care about you so, let me ask you this: Do we need to start a mass campaign to help get some friends? :-) The reason I ask is because on your blog it's showing you have ZERO friends! So, let us know if you need us to at least help you have a few more friends, man! :-) ( It's showing zero on your Twitter status/TwitStamp at http://twittermaven.blogspot.com/ )

[Warren Sukernek]

I appreciate the concern, but I think that was some kind of system error. Twitstamp shows my Twitter friends as 1305 which seems accurate. I've noticed that it loads slowly sometimes.

Thanks again!

[Vincent Wright]

Just teasing, Warren. I KNOW you have more than zero friends both on and off Twitter.

But, though we may want to start a separate thread, I'm wondering why Twitstamp took us to a page OTHER than Friends when clicking on the Friends button?

[Warren Sukernek]

That's a good one. it looks like anywhere you click on twitstamp takes you only to the twitstamp.com site. Although it displays your twitter info, it doesn't give you anything actionable.