Signal/Social Media

My gift to the world, Guy Kawasaki minus the Alltop.

Posted on by Gregg Hilferding

I’m not the only one who is frustrated by how often Guy posts about alltop. Guy’s response to the criticism? “Unfriend me.”

It’s nice that he’s honest about not changing, but it flies in the face of everything he says about listening to the customer. With “do as he says, not as he does” in mind, I offer to put his customer’s back in control.

Announcing a twitter bot that retweets everything Guy Kawasaki tweets, as long as it doesn’t contain “alltop.”

Meet the real Guy Kawasaki: http://twitter.com/gk_minusalltop

Caveats:

  1. It’s updated once a minute, so occasionally you’ll be 1 minute behind the over 60,000 other people who want to know what’s going on with Guy.
  2. If Guy complains, Twitter might choose to remove this account. I doubt that will happen since Gal Kawasaki seems to be allowed.
  3. I have no intention of checking any replies to gk_minusalltop. It’s a bot, you can contact me at my twitter account at @whoisgregg or leave a comment below.

Update #1 I fixed the bug where @replies weren’t being posted. Apparently PHP’s implementation of cURL thinks that anything that starts with an “@” is a path to a file. All working now. Amazingly, over 20 followers and Guy noticed it right away. As I told him, I like him and I like Alltop, but too much of the two together is not so good.

Update #2 A bit more explanation of how this came to be… I saw this tweet from Guy the other day where he explains that he sifts through 60K+ followers updates by simply ignoring anything that doesn’t contain “Alltop.” My immediate thought was, “What a great idea! If only everyone who followed Guy could do the exact opposite for his tweets.” Today at lunch I realized I had just recently coded up a twitter bot and with a few modifications could have exactly that feature available. Amazingly people are already following it and at a rate much faster than can be explained by twitter spam bots. ;)

I’m glad I could help. :)

Update #3 @gk_minusalltop has been running 13 days and has attracted 131 followers. The bot updates the Bio with how many alltop tweets it has *not* retweeted. In 13 days, 265 of Guy’s 810 updates have included “Alltop” in them. So, basically a third less tweets and at Guy’s rate, that’s 20 less tweets every day. Definitely a worthwhile project. :)

Update #4 @gk_minusalltop has been running 84 days and has attracted 589 followers. Guy linked to a page about Star Trek four times about a week ago. He was being sneaky by using an adjix link to point to Alltop instead of being upfront about his advertising. Thanks to Leo Notenboom and Ed Palumbo for catching it. The good news? The bot is smart enough now to check if Guy is posting an Alltop link without being honest about it. Should I add a counter for how many times he posts sneaky links? ;)

Update #5 Guy has switched from using Adjix to a new custom short URL service: trkk.us. Unfortunately, this service uses javascript redirects to circumvent the method @gk_minusalltop *was* using to check for sneaky links. I’m working on it, but I can see where this is headed. What a shame. :/

ZOMG 102px tall!
ZOMG 102px tall!
Update #6 It feels like whack-a-mole sometimes. Now Guy is using the URL shortening service om.ly which adds an incredible 102px tall neon gold and orange header around above other site’s content. And, of course, now there’s no hint of Alltop advertising in the tweet’s themselves. So, this is what I’ve done:
  • Automatically removes all ghosttwitter posts (they always advertise for Alltop)
  • Do extra testing for any weird URL shorteners that pop up
  • Hired an army of rabbits trained to recognize the particular shade of orange/gold that Alltop uses to manually check each tweet

Of course, if the rabbits get tired or run out of food, the occasional tweet may slip through. The trick is to tell me as soon as you recognize an Alltop spamvertisement so I can train the rabbits to recognize the new trick. BTW, that screenshot links to an article with this great quote:

The most important lesson that I’ve learned about business through all these years is that the great companies are founded on the desire to make meaning—and not necessarily to make money.

– Guy Kawasaki

Thanks for that, Guy.

Gregg Hilferding

10 Comments

  2. Gregg,

    While you could consider Guy’s tweets that end with “More on AllTop at…” as ads, it seems, overall, to be working for Guy since the number of people following him keeps increasing. The AllTop ads that appear at the end of his tweets doesn’t lessen the value of his tweet content anymore than the trailer at the end of a HotMail, AOL, or Yahoo! e-mail.

    Cheers,
    Joe

  3. Joe,

    Thanks for the comment! :) I’m actually not anti-ads or anti-commercial twitter accounts.

    I don’t think we can say that adding “more on alltop” at the end of each post is actually what increases his follower count. Considering the frequency of negative alltop feedback tweets, I’d say it’s that he increases his follower count in spite of adding alltop to so many tweets.

    I like the correlation between the alltop taglines and the trailers at the end of free email accounts. I agree it doesn’t change the value of the content itself, but it definitely affects your perception of the person who allows that branding in their message.

    In this case, Guy is submarining his personal brand to try to build the Alltop brand. That’s his prerogative. This bot is for people who just want “Guy” instead of “Alltop Guy. More on Alltop at http://guy.alltop.com“

    Thanks,
    Gregg

  4. Hi Dan! What a neat coincidence that you found this without knowing it was me. :)

    Welcome to my personal blog. This is the quietest spot of all the things I do online. (Well, until this little project.)

  5. Greg,

    Please change the avatar. People think that I created this Twitter account, and they are responding to it as if it’s me.

    By the way, I never said “listen to every customer and do everything they ask.”

    Thanks,

    Guy

  6. Hi Guy,

    I’ll change the avatar today. Sorry for the confusion. :)

    No, you certainly never said that. Of course, at this point we’re not talking about 2 or 3 customers, we’re talking about over 400. If this were someone else’s business, at what point would you recommend they start listening?

    Thanks for dropping by,
    Gregg

  7. Maybe one without adjix too? I’m all for someone promoting themselves & advertising, btw, but it’s too much the way he does it, and I hate missing the few valuable posts he has. And quite frankly, I tend to think that most of those followers for Guy are the ‘social media guru’ spammers that just retweet anything from people w/ big follower numbers to try to pass themselves off as experts. Eventually it will erode his brand as spam as well.

  8. Hi Gregg,

    AWESOME!!! I agree with you. Less AllTop.
    GK’s AllTop references are quite the joke on twitter. It appears to still work for him though.

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  10. Hey Gregg, thanks for the mention in ‘Update 4’ – I was just googleing myself and was furious to see a picture of Guy Kawasaki in my image results about 20 pages back (I know, I’m a dork) but was pleased as punch to find that you had given me some credit for catching Guy being sneaky.

    Just turned my Guy Kawasaki frown upside down, again.

    Keep up the great work, and thanks again.

    Ed

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