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.

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.