Ear Infection Sufferer Gets Her Condition Pimped on Twitter

Well the solution to this one is perhaps keep your ear aches to yourself if you don’t want to be marketed with products for the problem (grin). You could also set up a private following as well if you just wanted a close group of friends to know what is going on. Just like everything else we are getting sold every time we turn around. Funny too how Home Depot stepped right in there too about painting her room.

Eardoc was the company who tweeted back with their product related to her Ear condition. Not too long ago I did a post on Blue Cross in the Chicago area scanning Twitter posts and having someone from customer service tweet back. We could fill up the tweets with health insurance claims and service too. We could fight back and post some “fake” conditions and questions and overload poor Twitter, but no that wouldn’t be appropriate as Twitter has enough issues of it’s own here and there. It appears we are entering a new era in shopping, just put a tweet out there and let the vendors come to you, maybe in groves. As this continues to grow, this could get very interesting.

Customer Service with Twitter – Blue Cross Blue Shield Health Insurance Will find You

As Twitter continues to grow, businesses will continue to find ways to reach us, and the same is true with other social networks as well. BD

April 17 (Bloomberg) -- Rachel Gard, who started using Twitter two months ago to keep in touch with friends, says she may stop using the site if companies keep contacting her.

Already Home Depot Inc. has wished her luck painting her room, a medical company recommended its device for her ear infection, and a DJ told her to check out his single.

“I don’t want random people contacting me,” said Gard, 21, who lives in Clearwater, Florida. “Don’t try to sell yourself through my Twitter. While these approaches may not be intrusive, some companies are using the service to send spam and unsolicited marketing -- a problem Twitter is taking steps to fix. The company disabled a feature this month that allowed users to automatically “follow” people who follow them. Spammers used this feature to quickly set up mass networks.

Twitter gets some revenue from Microsoft Corp., which sponsors a site that carries Tweets from executives. While Twitter hasn’t said how it will make money apart from that, the company has indicated that it may charge businesses for access to its users. There are numerous outside programs, such as TwitterTroll and Tweefind, that companies use to comb the site for references to their products.

Twitter users can also be part of the problem. Services such as Magpie and AdCause pay Twitter users for the right to post ads in their streams of messages. The posts are formatted just like regular Tweets, with a label to show they are ads.