Earlier this week, we had one of the best discussions ever had on this blog. Here’s a quick recap:
My friend Geno asked about coffee grinders. I responded with a link to the coffee grinder that I own and love. That link was an affiliate link.
My question was simply, is that cool to do? Read the full discussion here.
The consensus amongs the readers of this blog (who are mostly affiliate marketers) was pretty much that it was ok. But this was mostly because I own the grinder, I know the person I replied to, and he specifically asked for a recommendation. Some felt that I should have disclosed. One or two didn’t like it at all.
Fast forward a few days, and we see another example of similar activity. Funnily enough, it’s the same guy who commented on my activity.
Here are three tweets from him today…
I followed the Oakley one and it appeared to be an affiliate link. I think it’s pretty safe to assume that they all are, but for the sake of discussion, we certainly can.
From what I can observe, it appears that he searched for terms like “looking to buy”, “looking for” and found posts like this
and
and responded with some helpful recommendations.
So was THIS cool?
I didn’t write this to single out this person who I will not name (though of course that’s not really hiding him) and I don’t want this to turn into a judge and jury. (Though some of that’s been happening on twitter already.)
We’re all feeling out the limits of what’s acceptible behavior on the interwebs. I think it’s important to consider what we’re doing and the impact that it has on a platform like twitter, as well as the public reputation of online marketers.
The thing that stands out to me the most is that what he’s doing cannot be addressed with the “unfollow” button. These people he’s replying to are not following him from what I can tell. If they watch their replies, they cannot avoid this sort of thing. And what if there were 10 people doing this.
What do you think?
Now consider this
The logical next step is for someone to set up a twitter bot, that nobody necessarily follows, that watches for keywords like “looking to buy” and “laptop” or “television” (or whatever). It automatically replies with a helpful post on where to buy an item like that.
Oh, did I say that out loud?
