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So: is this really where we’re at? Is this the best we can do? You gather a bunch of followers, and then spam them with a nice, web2.0, 140-character message saying:

“double whopper plus fries for only $1.99 at a McDonald’s near you”

You gotta love this! It’s like email spam marketing, but for the web2.0 crowd! ;-)

So, Twitter is going to launch an advertising solution, because…

People are constantly “talking and engaging with brands, sharing their feedback” […] “What if brands start to participate?”. He added that the company will make it “explicitly clear that a sponsor” paid for the ad, and make it “relevant and useful, so the user doesn’t think of it as an ad”.

How many times is this wrong? People talk about brands and products, and companies should jump in with… ads? Was somebody complaining about there not being enough ads? Really? Call it the advertising delusion. And what about the part in which they say that the ads will be clearly marked as such, and yet so useful that the users won’t think of them as ads? Listen up, Mr. Marketer. If people are talking about your company and your products, the only way to participate in the conversation is to talk back. That is, to let people in your company freely talk back about your products and services and their problems and what they can do to minimise them. Any other “solution” will do more harm than good.