Brad Reese at BradReese.com writes that it seems ailing network giant Cisco (CSCO) has bought Twitter followers for Chief Strategy Officer Padmasree Warrior. Mr. Reese asks if Cisco purposely violate the Twitter rules that forbid the purchasing of accounts to gain followers?
Mr. Reese points to information from TwitterAudit which exposes Twitter fraud is reporting: Approximately half-a-million (509,426) of the Twitter followers of the network gear maker’s Chief Strategy Officer, Padmasree Warrior, are fake Twitter accounts.
“Each audit takes a random sample of 5000 Twitter followers for a user and calculates a score for each follower. This score is based on number of tweets, date of the last tweet, and ratio of followers to friends. We use these scores to determine whether any given user is real or fake. Of course, this scoring method is not perfect but it is a good way to tell if someone with lots of followers is likely to have increased their follower count by inorganic, fraudulent, or dishonest means.“
Mr. Reese writes he ran the following Status People check on the 1.4 million Twitter followers of Cisco Chief Strategy Officer, Padmasree Warrior:
The practice of buying Twitter followers to boost your reputation in an online network seems to be mainstream business, as any Google search on the topic will show. It has also been covered by the New York Times, “Buying Their Way to Twitter Fame” Network World, “Inside the real economy behind fake Twitter accounts” and even mentioned on NPR.
rb-
I signed up to follow the networking business’s CSO to see what competitive insights I could gain from the CSO. The tweets coming out of the Cisco Chief Strategy Officer was were often so pointless that they seemed to be coming from a 16-year-old and not a key business person in the IT world.
The tweets were so pointless I just ignored them, now I am going to expend the effort to actually unfollow Warrior …..
Done – So now Cisco you will have to buy another Twitter follower to follow pointless tweets for your business leaders – Now get back to making great network gear.
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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.