Buying Relationships on Twitter

It turns out the @cnnbrk Twitter account (the most followed account on Twitter) that posts news alerts from CNN.com had nothing to do with CNN. It was created James Cox, known on Twitter as @imajes, who managed to amass 944,000+ followers for @cnnbrk.

Alley Insider is reporting that CNN has now acquired the account although the details are not yet known. This is interesting on a number of levels although it’s a unique case that it might make it hard to draw any firm conclusions.

Firstly, it raises the question of whether Twitter accounts and their followers can be successfully bought and sold. This immediately sets off alarm bells because in principle it’s no different than buying and selling email lists or any other type of data without user permission.

It doesn’t even really matter so much if this is ethically wrong or not as much as the fact that in the long run buying users that never opted-in to receiving your messages is ineffective. They will opt-out (if they’re paying attention in the first place, which might be the bigger problem when buying Twitter followers).

Regardless, it definitely changes the relationship between the account owner and its followers after the fact. This is a theme Dave Winer blogged about recently when speculating about Twitter’s own business model and the potential for a conflict with users’ values.

Buying and selling individual Twitter accounts presents the same risk because it changes existing relationships. Although, a Twitter audience is obviously not captive. It’s easy to hit the ‘unfollow’ button and maybe some @cnnbrk users will.

What makes this situation unique is that I think a lot of followers probably assumed @cnnbrk was created and curated by CNN to start with. In reality, the relationship they thought they had before was false and now that CNN have acquired the account they’ve got what they signed up for in the first place.

Secondly, if Twitter accounts change hands it creates the potential and perhaps the likelihood that the content or the volume of content will change too. Will Twitter relationships withstand this type of change?

I’m not exactly sure how @cnnbrk determined what to post and whether it was manual or automated somehow. Looking at the most recent history it looks like there were no more than a handful of tweets each day and several days where there were none at all.

Again, this case is unique because the content posted on @cnnbrk were snippets of news items published on CNN.com so the Twitter content will be drawn from the same source, it just depends how it’s tweeted.

It probably makes sense for CNN to add links to full articles in tweets in order to drive (and measure) traffic to its site and this would be helpful rather than offensive for users. But, there must be a temptation to increase the frequency of tweets in order to grow traffic since @cnnbrk is now a commercial concern.

We will have to wait and see if any of these changes happen, the effect it has on the follower total, if any, and what any of it even means.

At SES, Guy Kawasaki demonstrated the apparent power of distributing links via Twitter (automatically using Twitterfeed). But on the flip side, @jacobh tweeted that the click-through on NYTimes.com links was less than 1% which makes it hard to generalize any conclusions on raw numbers of Twitter followers at this point.

Have thoughts? I’d love to hear them.

UPDATE: Alley Insider have updated their post and it looks like CNN have been working with James Cox on @cnnbrk for over two years so whatever changed hands was some sort of consulting fee.

Dan Frommer also points out that Twitter’s terms prevent buying and selling Twitter accounts so I guess this was a non-starter unless we see other creative ways to transfer ‘ownership’ of accounts.

Posted on April 15, 2009