I don’t know who’s managing the District 9 twitter marketing campaign, but their abuse of twitter (via their creation of Twam – “twitter spam”) just caused me to decide not to go see the movie tonight.  Here’s the history of the experience.

On August 15th, I tweeted “has anyone seen District 9?  Worth it?”  I got a handful of generally positive responses including one that said "@bfeld district 9 was very good.  stylistically a bit reminiscent of 28 Days Later.  well done  and entertaining.  also, go see hurt locker.”  I didn’t recognize the handle of the person that tweeted it to me but I noticed it since it was more descriptive than others.

Over the past three days I’ve now gotten over 20 tweets from people I don’t recognize that say exactly the same thing.  For example, I just got one from Joanne ODonnell (apedvatu).  I don’t know Joanne (if she even exists) and her twitter account is garbage. 

Or how about the tweet from Dominique Arnold.  Exactly the same text.  Same drill – no clue who Dominique is and her tweets are a bunch of district 9 crap.

This is classic marketing spam.  No different than all the email garbage we get every day (that a whole industry has been created to deal with).  To date, Twitter has done a great job of dealing with twam but it’ll logically get worse, especially now that all you need to be a “social media consultant” is a twitter account. 

As I was writing this, I saw a tweet pop up on a TechCrunch article titled “You’re Doing It Wrong Part 348: Complete And Utter PR FAIL”  I think the dynamics around social media marketing are now going to get a lot worse now before it settles down.

Guess I’m going to see Julie & Julia tonight instead of District 9.  Amy told me that District 9 looks too scary for me anyway.