I would not be so vain as to imagine that my contributions to the “gaming Twitter followers” debate, nor the post they prompted by Will Heaven at the Telegraph, had anything to do with Econsultancy’s announcement yesterday that it was unfollowing the impressive 19,000 people its @econsultancy account had followed.

But I am going to chip in. Because, Chris Lake, merely unfollowing the 19,000 people your script followed for you isn’t good enough. And nor are the seeming half-truths and curious definitions in your blog post.

Let’s start with the claim that you were “experimenting” with Twitter when you employed an autofollow script. Were you young and naive in the ways of Twitter? Did you just want to see what would happen? Hmm. Smacks of the same kind of bullshit that @Mazi told the Telegraph:

Nadjm has made clear that his Twitter following has grown organically and properly. “I use Twitter as a networking experiment,” he tells me. “I manually follow hundreds of people using Twitter directories and by searching for hashtags such as #Iranelection which particularly interest me. But I have used Huitter.com to unfollow people who don’t follow me back, which can be painstaking otherwise, given the presence of hundreds of bots and spammers on Twitter. I have never knowingly violated Twitter’s terms of service.”

It didn’t wash when he said it, because he was deliberately misleading about his following methods. (Though he doesn’t explicitly state that he only follows manually, that’s what he means to imply.) And it doesn’t wash in your post, either.

It looks spammy to have 19,000 followers and to follow 19,000 people, but we don’t used Hummingbird or any pyramid software tools to grow our follower count. Our Twitter presence has grown organically.

“Looks” spammy? Sure does. You clearly used an autofollow script (which you admit earlier in the post), which suggests that you intended to artificially inflate your follower count. Even if you didn’t intend that, autofollow scripts do have that effect. Why hide behind this disingenuous and cutesy “we’re curious peeps here at Econsultancy” defence?

I presume by “Our Twitter presence has grown organically”, you mean that it has steadily increased at about the same rate. Well, duh: that’s what happens when you use an autofollow script. That’s not what I, and I’m guessing most other people, mean by “organic”.

“We simply want to start from scratch,” writes Chris. But this isn’t starting from scratch at all, Chris: what you’ve done is dump the a suspicious follower/following ratio, leaving a Twitter account that looks like it has been naturally followed by nearly 17,000 people. Forgive me for thinking that’s not plausible: at a bare minimum, the autofollow script is likely to have inflated that 17,000 by a few thousand. If you don’t understand that, you need to get out of social media.

What’s worrying about Econsultancy’s behaviour here is that not only did they start out with bad practices (I don’t buy their claims about “experimentation”), they’re now prevaricating and have embarked on a course of action that appears to make the offence even graver. Effectively, they’re burying bad behaviour, conveniently assuming (because they have no way of knowing) that their Twitter account has 17,000 natural followers. There’s just no way to tell.

So I’m challenging Chris to really start again by using the following method to clear out @Econsultancy’s follower count too. Why not start from zero on both sides?

I wonder if he’s got the balls to do it.

How to really “start from scratch” without losing your Twitter handle

Let’s assume your current account is called @JohnSmith.

• You’ll need to register a fresh, second account (call it @JohnSmith1) with an alternative email address.
• What you want to do is transfer the name @JohnSmith from the old account to the new one. First, log in to @JohnSmith via the website and change the username to @JohnSmith2.
• Immediately log out and log in to the new account (currently @JohnSmith1) and change the name of that account to @JohnSmith.
• Finally, you’ll want to archive your old account (the one with the gamed follower count), so rename that to something like @OldJohnSmith. That way you can still access your old tweets.

Update: In light of a comment below, I have modified my wording slightly to make it clear that even if it’s true Econsultancy only followed “real” followers back, rather than aggressively pursuing new ones, as I charge @Mazi with doing, my challenge stands. What Chris proposes isn’t “starting from scratch” as I understand the term.

A few of you may remember a little shindig we had at Liverpool Street Station earlier in the year to celebrate Michael Jackson’s death. About 2,000 people came together for a “mass moonwalk”. You can see CNN’s coverage of the event here.

Don Riddell asked me to appear on CNN again to talk about the moonwalk as part of their end-of-year round-up. We revisited Liverpool Street (I hadn’t been back since) a few weeks ago and talked about Michael Jackson’s legacy. The interview is here.

And here’s the original coverage from the moonwalk:

I did say I was going to depersonalise this debate. And I meant it: look out for my post on the subject in January, which will be concerned with the issue of gaming followers and its effect on online reputation.

But in the meantime, it seems that Telegraph.co.uk has picked up the story. For those interested, here’s how they’re reporting it (click through to the original for pictures and links):

Have you ever wondered how some Twitter users manage to gain a huge following, despite having fairly limited online profiles otherwise? Welcome to “gaming”, a practice causing huge controversy in the Twitterverse. Put simply, gaming involves a small number of Twitterers who follow hundreds of people at a time (manually or using software), then “unfollow” those who don’t return the favour. This causes an overall long-term rise in their total follower counts, which artificially boosts their reputations online. Big tech industry names, all of whom have gained their followings “organically”, tell me they are keen to stamp out this practice.

One of the figures connected to this controversy is Maz Nadjm who, in his own words, is the man “responsible for social media at Sky TV”. PR Week once named him “the most influential communications professional on Twitter in the UK”, and he has been a speaker at the 140 Characters Conference, as well as a host of other high-profile social media events. But one well-known tech blogger is accusing Nadjm of “gaming” his Twitter account to boost his online profile.

@Mazi – Nadjm’s Twitter username – is followed by an impressive 33,201 people as of today. But just take a look at this graph from the excellent Twittercounter.com, which shows the number of people he has followed on Twitter over the last three months:

Sharp peaks and troughs in a graph can indicate that a Twitter user has added hundreds of people at a time and simply removed those who won’t follow back, a practice which guarantees an overall rise in the number of followers. According to his updated Twitter account, Nadj has 33,201 followers and is following 33,927. As one well-known London online reputation manager puts it: “The closer the two numbers are together, the more likely it is that [perfectly legal] modifications have been made. Is an individual likely to manually follow tens of thousands of people. Would you?”

On top of this, last week’s graph seems to show that Nadjm added a staggering 1,464 followers in one day. In the same week, the graph suggests that he also removed 1,262 people from his “following” list.

According to a well-informed source, very high numbers sometimes indicate that a “script” may have been used – a simple piece of code which directs a Twitter account to follow people and unfollow those who don’t follow back (there are dozens of these available online – and their use is banned by Twitter.com). In contrast to the graph above, here’s what another “following” increase looks like over the same three-month period:

Nadjm has made clear that his Twitter following has grown organically and properly. “I use Twitter as a networking experiment,” he tells me. “I manually follow hundreds of people using Twitter directories and by searching for hashtags – such as #Iranelection – which particularly interest me. But I have used Huitter.com to unfollow people who don’t follow me back, which can be painstaking otherwise, given the presence of hundreds of bots and spammers on Twitter. I have never knowingly violated Twitter’s terms of service.”

So “Mazigate“, as it has been termed online, may be evidence of nothing more than someone with stunning new popularity. But the practice of “gaming” is apparently endemic among social media experts and agencies and, although it’s not illegal, certain techniques have been explicity banned by Twitter. Yet dozens of third-party Twitter applications promise thousands of additional followers in an instant – often for large sums of money.

For people who use Twitter professionally, a follower count is often considered to be an accurate indicator of your online profile: it reflects your influence and connections in social media. So those who “game” are seen by many to be cheating to get ahead, in the same way that someone might adjust the achievements on their CV in order to get a job. Some gamers are also hoodwinking their technologically illiterate bosses into thinking they are highly successful. It’s a masterclass in how to capitalise in a new technological field – and all the more infuriating for honest techies because it so consistently works.

Good to see the mainstream media acknowledging the importance of keeping it real. Onwards and upwards.

I hope you’ll all be able to join the #LDnnudetech team, our models and our sponsors at the Launch Party on Monday. It will be held at 7pm in the Velvet Room at Sway in Covent Garden.

We’ll be giving everyone a preview of the pictures at the launch party. No one else will have seen them, and no one will again until we ship the printed calendars. So this is your chance to get a sneak peek before anyone else! Booze will be provided by the marvellous Naked Wines. Get there early or miss out!

So we have an idea of numbers, I’d be really grateful if you’d take a moment to RSVP.

See you there!

Friday 2 October is my last day in London. I’ll be moving to Cambridge this weekend to start an English course. It’ll be pretty intense, so I don’t envisage many trips to town during term time.

I realise what a tragedy this will be for all of you. I’m certainly sad to be going. I arrived pretty abruptly onto the tech scene, but was incredibly warmly welcomed. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know a new industry and an awesome community of smart, interesting people. Thank you to those who have helped and supported me.

I’ve also made a number of very close friends in a pretty short space of time. I’ll be pestering them from afar on a regular basis. And I’ll still be writing about and reporting on technology from university, though I’ll have to dial it down a bit, of course.

So… this isn’t “it”. And I’ll be back before you know it.

Unless I get seduced by a PhD.

Don’t get me wrong: I hugely admire Ben Goldacre for his vicious skewering of hacks who peddle bad science. It’s just that I have this irrational fear that one day I’m going to open the newspaper and read that he’s keeping his followers captive in a jungle compound.

I mean, don’t you think it’s all going to his head a bit? Especially since he didn’t win the Samuel Johnson prize. (Sorry, Ben, that just slipped out – I didn’t mean it. Put that meat cleaver down!)

A couple of people have been asking me what this “lube wrestling” thing is all about. So here’s the deal: on Friday night, Sam Mathews and I will be hosting a party at Adam Street private members club (somehow, we managed to convince them to let us hold it in their gallery).

The party will include semi-naked wrestling in a paddling pool filled with lubricant, in celebration of Sam’s birthday and the launch of his new company. Afterwards, there will be alcohol and dancing.

If you want to come and you haven’t received an invitation from me or from Sam, you’ll need to drop me an email asking to be put on the guest list. Ask nicely. It’ll help if you’re a guy who works out and is prepared to take part in the wrestling. (Or a hot girl, says Sam.) You’ll need to sign up on the Facebook page to get on the guest list.

That’s kind of the long and short of it, really. We’re still looking for sponsors, so if you’re able to help, please get in touch.

Now look here. We need to have a word about this retweet business. There are two things you should know:

1. Retweeting should not be read as endorsement or agreement.
2. Retweeting means you want others to see whatever it is you’re retweeting. That is all.

All I intend when I RT something is for my followers to see it too. That might be because it’s brilliant, but it’s just as likely that I’m taking the piss out of the original tweeter and want to expose them to wider ridicule, à la TweetingTooHard. Because that’s how I am.

There are, of course, disingenuous rascals who make a point of (deliberately) interpreting everything one retweets as an endorsement of the original. But they are normally missing the point on purpose. When I share something with my followers, that’s all I’m doing. Sharing it. Unless I append a comment.

At least, that’s my RT policy and I’m sticking to it. Just so you know.

I have never been to Las Vegas. For good reason, my friends tell me. I don’t know if they’re right.

But I do know that it’s something everyone should do at least once in their lifetime. So I am. I’ll be arriving in time for Blogworld on 15-17 October, and staying until 20 October, or thereabouts. Might hop over to SF after that… who knows. It’s going to get interesting.

So who’s in? Gimme a shout by email and let’s get a list together. A word of caution: only the reckless need apply.

Just. Don’t.

That is all.