Top Social Media Consultancy hit by Twitter Porn Spam!

Even experts make mistakes. Today, when checking a top social media blog that I regularly follow, my attention was drawn to their ‘what people are saying about us on Twitter’ part of their homepage (see screenshot).

Twitter is a great way of communicating with your customers, as well as a great way of getting feedback from them. Unfortunately, as you can see below, some twitter-spammers have taken advantage of an honest attempt by this site to showcase their public feedback on their website.

Social media is an incredible source of user generated content, and widgets like this allow for real engagement between you, your website and your users, members or customers. However, allowing un-vetted content to be posted up on your homepage always has the potential to meet with disaster. To a large extent, the web is the Wild West, and if there are any opportunities that can be exploited, there will always be some soulless internet user who will be waiting to take advantage of them.

In the same way that webmasters have long moderated their blog comments, it is going to become increasingly necessary to regulate what’s being said about you on the social media platforms and applications that you can control. The hard part of course is that this kind of undermines the whole point of social media to begin with! You don’t want to stifle the conversation – and silencing criticism pretty much defeats the purpose of trying to engage with people over social media in the first place.

My suggestion? Monitor, monitor, monitor!

Social media is a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week operation. It never stops, it never goes to sleep. This means you need to put in place monitoring practices that make you or someone in your organization aware of what’s being placed on your website as often as is practically possible. You don’t want to be checking your Twitter feed at 4am, but you also don’t want to go large stints of time without at least checking what’s being plastered up on your property.

• Perhaps filtering direct twitter search result feeds against common “bad” words would be a good start.
• Developing software to allow moderation of twitter search results as feeds – sort of like comment moderation might be an option.

To see these spammers take advantage of this opening at this website proves that it can indeed happen to anyone. The key is to learn from it and ensure that it doesn’t happen in your own business.

Have you had any experience of this happening to you? Would love to hear your stories!

Note: Upon finding this Twitter Spam, Affilorama immediately contacted the company behind this website.