A source writes, telling me the answer to my question earlier tonight to @Mazi is less exciting than I imagined.

I’ve done a bit of digging, and it turns out that @Mazi, @Joe and @rhys_isterix are (or were) “community managers” for Sky (@Mazi) and MySpace (@Joe and @rhys_isterix) respectively. According my source, they each pimped their personal Twitter profiles to their respective (and very large) work communities. If you’ve ever had a MySpace profile, you’ll remember Tom, that “automatic friend” you had when you joined. Hardly surprising Tom had a lot of friends, was it?

So although it’s possible these three didn’t use a script or a service like uSocial, they didn’t exactly get the followers they have naturally. You can see that in the tell-tale 1:1 ratio between followers and followees. Normally 30,000 of each would indicate a script, but it seems that in this case it’s a different kind of laid-back acquisition.

I wasn’t that interested in all this until I saw how uncomfortable and evasive @Mazi got when I asked him if he’d gamed his follower count. Now I understand why. If my source is correct, it wasn’t that the answer to my question was yes (which would have been a difficult admission, since using a script will get your Twitter profile suspended); it was that the reason his Twitter account looks like it does is even sillier. But it would at least mean that, although opportunistic, he’s not being as outright dishonest as many of us thought.

If my source is correct.

But hang on a minute. The community manager defence doesn’t explain why @Mazi and the others follow so many spambots and sex accounts. It doesn’t explain why their respective Twitter audiences are so poorly engaged, given their size. It doesn’t explain why @Joe admitted gaming his followers to a mutual friend at @Mazi’s own event, @cozytweetup.

And it doesn’t explain graphs like this one. In the words of a social media consultant friend of mine:

It’s quite simple. He culls 1k each time who aren’t following him back. Do it for the past 3 months and you can see on the graph that it’s not a smooth, organic line graph. Each peak comes after a trough.

Whatever the explanation, there’s no escaping the fact that there’s something fishy about these follower counts. Something that makes me wonder. Something other than the natural acquisition of followers as a result of being funny, or famous, or adding value to the community in some other way. When people like @mikebutcher are only tickling 15,000 (and follow a manageable 2,000), yet comparative nobodies have these strange 30,000 on both sides arrangements, you just know that something is going on.

They’ll tell you it’s none of anyone else’s business how they run their Twitter accounts. And they’re right, to a point. I mean, what do I care that they have to painstakingly select each of their actual friends from the 30,000-strong throng for custom TweetDeck columns, just so they can see what the people they genuinely know are saying?

But when @Mazi, in the face of strong evidence to the contrary, denies using a script or paid service to artificially inflate his follower count*, you have to wonder either why he’s lying, or why the numbers look like they do. All the evidence from online analytics tools suggests that the “community manager” defence simply isn’t good enough: the follower graph just wouldn’t look like that. So is there some other means of follower inflation I don’t know about? (Apparently, yes: see the update below.)

Ultimately, we’re just talking Twitter followers here. It’s not like this matters. @Mazi’s not committing any crime, he’s just being inauthentic and engineering his Twitter account to make his influence appear much greater than it is to those who don’t know any better. But “gaming influence” – which I charge each of the three people above with – raises some interesting questions:

(a) Why do this in the first place? Is it just ego?

(b) Have these guys had any positive benefits to having an apparently huge number of followers? Are their bosses impressed (because they don’t know any better)?

(c) Does anyone actually fall for this shit? That is, are @Mazi et al successful in misrepresenting their influence?

(d) Do they regret doing it? Would they consider starting afresh from 0?

Needless to say (although I did say it, yesterday), everyone’s favourite “conversation agency”, @wearesocial, is up to the same tricks. Only they don’t have the community manager defence.

The most important thing online is authenticity. You can be a total dick (and frequently I am), but you must always keep it real. How much easier this would have been if one of them had just given me a straight answer in the first place.

* I’ve rephrased this paragraph in light of the comment below from Nick. (Thanks, Nick!)

Update: @Joe has been in touch via Twitter. He’s asked me to make it clear that he did not use a scripting service (which is prohibited by Twitter’s terms of service), apparently contradicting the account I received from a mutual friend, above. Here’s what he says:

I didn’t use an automatic scripting service to add people, but you are completely right, my follower count is gamed. I was made redundant from MySpace & realised in order for companies to take you seriously you had to have a strong Twitter presence. It’s like going to an interview with an Armani suit on rather than an M&S one, it backs up the social media knowledge I possess. One [method] is called FlashTweet which is ok, I don’t really use them, I tend to manually follow ppl.

“Social media experts” are always banging on about “authenticity” and “authentic conversations”. But how authentic are they really?

The mess around Eurostar this weekend reminded me of my favourite “conversation agency”, we are social (who list Eurostar as a client, and are apparently in charge of the brand’s social media strategy). Let’s leave aside the pisspoor job Eurostar and their representatives have done this weekend: Mike Butcher has taken them apart already.

But take a look at we are social’s primary Twitter feed:

Notice that? Yeah, dodgy innit. 186 tweets but nearly 30,000 followers, with about the same number of followees. So what did others think?

Much the same as me, then.

There are two reasons these kind of numbers appear: either we are social paid for Twitter followers using a service like uSocial or someone in the office used a script that automatically follows and unfollows other people to artificially inflate the follower count.

When an individual does this, it’s a bit tragic. But when an agency whose reputation depends on authenticity does it, it’s much worse.

“But @wearesocial is just a feed!” whined Nathan McDonald to me last night. Err, OK, Nathan… why bother faking so many followers then? How is it in any way authentic to inflate your follower numbers using an automated script? Are you really “listening, understanding and engaging in conversations” with 30,000 people?

No, Nick. Neither do I.

What a brilliant wheeze social media is. So many big brands falling over themselves to throw cash at agencies staffed by schoolchildren. Look at we are social’s Who We Are page. Brilliant: every teenager with a Twitter account is a “manager” or an “executive”. (I’m not the only one to have noticed this.) I’ve met several of the people who now work at that agency and haven’t been impressed by one of them.

Social media experts, eh. There aren’t enough bullets.

(Image: Paul Clarke)

Imagine a world in which you’re charged £100 ($165) for two days’ worth of electricity.

Where a basic internet connection costs £300 ($500) for two days. (That’s even more expensive than the WiFi at the Charlotte Street Hotel in London, which costs an astonishing 30p/min – or £18/hr.).

Where you cough up £3,500 ($6,000) for a tiny booth, in the hope of securing a few leads for your fledgling business.

Welcome to the world of the trade show.

I had press registration for ad:tech this week, but I wasn’t planning to attend because I was too exasperated by their constant spamming. At the time of writing, I’ve received over twelve messages – some by email, some by SMS – “reminding” me about the conference. We get the message, guys. You want us there.

But if you did pay – and rolling up on the day as a visitor would have cost you over £1,000 – what would you have got for your money?

Well, networking and product demonstrations, mainly. Many of the big players in the online advertising and marketing industries were there (though not all of them), so it was a chance to connect with potential clients, suppliers and even competitors. Fair enough. But I know several companies who are doing alright at the moment and are skipping out on these events because they’re not prepared to pay such high charges.

If you’ve ever been to a trade show, you’ll know that it’s a charming mix of free condoms (”safe advertising”, said the slogan), sour apple lollipops and slappers in high heels doling out flyers to sweaty, overweight ad execs. I wandered around today totally confused as to why anyone would shell out over a thousand quid to be here. Is anyone really so lazy that they can’t pick up the phone to arrange a couple of meetings?

Now, ad:tech isn’t the only offender. Not by a long shot. (Indeed, the fact that it’s the most successful advertising technology conference suggests that exhibitors consider it the best value for money.) But they sure are profiting nicely from the industry.

That internet connection? It’s an ethernet cable for one machine only that you’re not allowed to share. And if you haven’t paid your ground rent when you arrive, they will escort you and your equipment off the premises.

At least one company this year, seen arriving and setting up on Monday night but strangely absent by Tuesday morning, is understood to have had trouble coughing up in time. One exhibitor described “attack dogs” roaming around Olympia 2, hunting down exhibitors who hadn’t paid for their “extras”. Nice, guys. Really nice. Way to go supporting an industry in crisis in the middle of a recession.

I often wake in the middle of the night, with what I imagine at the time to be a game-changingly insightful or brilliant train of thought suspended in mid-air in front of me. I’m immmediately gripped by panic, worried that I might lose it if I don’t get it down. So I flip open my MacBook and start typing furiously. When I’m done, I get back in to bed, and am usually asleep again within a few minutes.

I have about three hundred of these frantically-recorded night-time memos now. Here’s one of them.

How bda could things get if social networking turned nasty?
the major engine of destructon could be the recession
in a recessuibm cult-0liuke cgroupd form around certaub individuals
exciting at first
as in evey pyramid scheme, the btrsk poiny srrives
how could beple use twitter to wreak havoc in the sreets
could Teitter be used as an instument of ctimr, ettort,m  twitter
rumors srtrrt of a salr in an oxford st sotore which is mnot relas big dicounts ptomised
rivl stores employd twittered to =do it
talk of huge surprisie discounts
certain people hav been given tweets with info
some staff in on it – believe it
ma7ybe eve =n some of the management
discount not materialise
riot
 
“city markry guru”
usese twitter to broadcast predicutions
aciting oon inside informatiob first 2 times
third time del talking down stocks so he canbuy at t tht loest point
 
How Twitter could spiral out of control
Factional at present, bit mpt int he sense of occoping campes: thse are veast interlocoking netweorks ofr like and lyalties that a re sometiges inf conflict.
“I really like him, as a person, but I read he blog vbery fght qinf
fractiuring of elleigances eeven in 1to1 peronsal reaptionshops
 
beceuase breviously your 1on1 partner got jut oner verion of you – now they get the whole public perona
I becomes impossible to tell a lie. Oj e slip, a tweet from the bous as ou’re waiting to arrive t your destination, and the firends your ditchingt will lnow what they were dumped for

My mate Damian Thompson recently had a go at the self-regarding concert pianist Angela Hewitt. He quoted extensively from Hewitt’s own blog, which lovingly records every compliment tossed in her direction by critics and fans (and adds a few of her own for good measure).

An outraged fan posted a complaint to Hewitt’s blog and was, in his own words, “enormously privileged” to receive a reply by email from Hewitt herself. He then pasted her reply in the comments section under Damian’s original post:

So what, precisely, is Ms Hewitt saying here? Sounds to me like she doesn’t rate Andrei Gavrilov’s mercurial playing. She didn’t quite use the phrase “half-crazed Russian butterfingers” but I fear that’s how the notoriously touchy Gavrilov will interpret it.

Also, like Hewitt, he has an army of wild-eyed fans. This could turn seriously nasty.