Let's End Mediocrity in Social Media Too

Om has a great post today about how the U.S. has not only become OK with mediocrity in 2008, we actually started rewarding it. See: auto bailout, banker bailout and every other kind of bailout our politicians are approving. Typically Silicon Valley gets no bailouts-- companies fail, and nimble startups replace them. But that doesn't mean there hasn't been the same mediocrity here in 2008. I'm talking about social media promotion and monetization. Link baiting to goose traffic, following any and everyone on Twitter so they'll follow you back, and the forced vitality that ran rampant in the early days of Facebook's platform. The cheap and meaningless obsession with forcing some metric to show that you are popular, at the cost of actually building something great.

As Scoble and others have been pointing out today, it's now Twitter application developers' turn. A rash of services ask you for your Twitter user name and password and send a Tweet for you when you try out their service. Twply is just the latest example. When you try out the service it sends a Twitter that says: "Just started using http://twply.com/ to get my @replies via email. Neat stuff!" Notice, it's even written in a conversational way, to hide that it's coming from the company. Or hide it for about ten seconds until you see that suddenly all your friends have started to use the phrase "Neat stuff!" Really, Twply?

Make no mistake: This is sleazy and annoying spam, and it's guaranteed that I try far fewer Twitter apps and immediately click away when a site asks for my user name and password. I did a keynote earlier this year where I talked about the incredibly low tolerance for spam on Twitter, because of the intimate nature of the conversations. Also because Twitters are frequently being pushed to your desktop or phone, it's far more disruptive than other more passive social media sites. People give Twitter permission to buzz their phones, because they can control who they hear from. When third party developers step in and usurp that right, it's far more offensive than a piece of spam delivered via email or even via Facebook. It's a sloppy, cheap and obnoxious way to spread the word about your product.

Here's an idea Twply: JUST BUILD A GOOD PRODUCT. Worse than the fact that it's spam itself is how mediocre it is at being spam! Tricking people into letting you use their Facebook or Twitter accounts to send unwanted promotional messages to their friends may get you a near term gain, but that's all it gets you. The startups that succeed in Silicon Valley do so because they come up with a newer, better way to build a business or solve a problem. They find hacks. They innovate. They build something that goes up and to the right for years-- not the next 30 minutes.