CNet reports that Andrew Baron has pulled the auction for his Twitter account. It was a clever little publicity stunt from day one, and credit to Andrew on it, but the following sounds severely retarded:
Essentially, he said, a fellow Twitterer wrote him suggesting that the people who were bidding the eBay auction well into four figures were “all spam marketers, people who will do anything just to get their name out there, people who don’t understand Web 2.0 and blogging.”
“I already knew,” Baron said, “there would be a great range of different types of (possible) outcomes. But I believed that I would be able to manage the outcome by trying to make a positive outcome for the buyer, for my friends and followers. Even if it wasn’t a good fit, I (believed) I could work with them. But after I heard that they were all just spam marketers, that just kind of killed it for me and I didn’t want to risk that.”….
Instead, he insisted to me, he just felt very uneasy about having the account–and his many followers–fall into the hands of people who didn’t necessarily have any idea how to use the account in a way that benefits all concerned.
WTF did he think would happen? that some utopian hippy would buy the account and spread peace and goodwill to his followers? lolz
Time for some appropriate Ben Folds Five 🙂
marketing genius
I’m liking the new blog style, Duncan. And I’m going with retarded. I think he really did think he could sell it, make bank, and not be vilified for it. I think the general reaction knowing it would be some spammer who had that access in the end made him realize he might have been the first to do it, but he’d always be known as the guy who sold his followers out.
Defintely not a marketing genius. Where is Rocketboom now? Stagnant. He is more into promoting himself and not his company.
You act like ‘retarded’ and ‘marketing genius’ are completely separate things.
Andy
good point lol 🙂