... Twitter Hijack

Read a story the other day about retailer Habitat returning to Twitter, months after trying to hijack topical issues for promotional purposes.

They were using the hashtags function for their wrong doings… basically when you tweet you can mark if your statuses are related to a specific topic through the use of the hash tag e.g. #chocolate, and users can then search on these, or see ‘trending topics’ where a number of people have been writing about the same thing. Often you see the odd funny thing trending as people try and get everyone to Tweet and join in a ‘hashtag game.’ An example of this was #lameclaimtofame where people tweeted stuff like ‘I once saw jude law in starbucks and he ordered the same drink as me.’

Habitat had used tags for the new iphone launch aswell as the Iranian election candidates, but when people interested in those topics click on them, they saw unrelated messages from Habitat encouraging people to sign up to their database for the chance to win a giftcard. Cheeky.

Sadly this happens a lot on Twitter though…  especially when a topic has been ‘trending’ for quite a while…. You, an interested party, click on the topic to see what people have been saying across the globe, and are met with a mash of promo-messages … all because they’ve used the hashtag for nasty self-promo reasons.

I guess you could say its clever; using current topics of interest to reach a large number of viewers. But it’s also seen as a nuisance, a form of spam.

I don’t think there’s anyway for Twitter to regulate this, and it’s a shame, but there still remains the millions of us using the service for good, and having fun in the process :)

(follow me @suzytobias ...)