How much would you be willing to sell your Twitter account for, given the opportunity?
I asked myself this question as I read an email yesterday from a gentleman who expressed a sincere interest in purchasing my Twitter account. I’m not sure how he found me initially. Perhaps it was through one of the ranking sites floating around. The point is, he found me.
I could have done it. I could have sent out a tweet saying that I was starting over. Then I could have changed my username to the buyer’s and opened a new account for myself. I could have posted here about starting fresh with Twitter and followed as many of you as I remember. I probably would have gotten away with it.
But I didn’t. I told him that there simply wasn’t any way I’d sell my account. Not because Twitter’s terms of service say it’s wrong, but because I don’t think it’s a good thing to do. I know it’s “online stuff” and I shouldn’t take things too seriously.
But I’ve begun to feel like it’s possible to build trust through exchanges like those that happen on Twitter. Perhaps it’s the element of impulse that makes it more believable. Perhaps it’s the presence of all the mundane information that reveals us all to be pretty boring individuals just looking for connections.
I’ll let the marketing spammers build their own conversations.
What do you think? I’d really appreciate your thoughts.
photo credit: Aaron1971
Wow I didn’t know people would want to buy these accounts, but I guess I can see why…
1. If you are looking [almost exclusively] for financial gain: “yes”!
2. If you are looking to preserve the online *reputation* you may have gained, so far, by using a tool like twitter (i.e. “who you are” for the cyber-community) – this may prove to be priceless, thus “not for sale”
re: #2
My thoughts exactly. It wasn’t an option because I’ve found tremendous value and built a lot of relationships through Twitter. It’s already something I can’t put a number on.
However, option #1 worries me when I think of how others will use their accounts.
It just seems somehow wrong and a betrayal to followers. I know you don’t owe them anything, probably don’t know most of them – but it still feels wrong.
Glad you didn’t do it.
Precisely. It’s not just a list of email addresses to be tossed at the highest bidder…and yet I see “marketers” treating Twitter like that every day.
Is it pride that makes me think of many people on Twitter as friends or is there a real connection that makes a sale, as you’ve said, wrong? For me, there is that connection.
You won’t see me selling. If he’d offered me a FlipHD…maybe. jk! I am looking for a used Flip though. =)
I think you did the right thing not selling. It’s too suspicious unless it was someone willing to open up some sort of “firm” and call it SethSimonds (which I have to admit does kind of sound cool.. imagining employees with business cards saying “I’m with SethSimonds I’m Mr. So and So’s 3′O clock” or either Seth or Simonds means something in another language and it’s catchy. And they wanted to make a try at your domain name as well. Outside it’s just too odd that someone with money couldn’t take the time to figure out how to create a very active and quality tweet account.
But let’s say the purchase was valid. Hmm I’d pass. To much of hassle. Outside someone dropping a bag filled with 1 Million dollars, a sheriff and a notary at your bank of choice.. probably not even worth really contemplating. And even than I’d warn my current followers of the sale.
For me sell my presence, I’d rather not, but if I were.. it’d be a complete package. domain name, and anything with the name. And the price would be very high.
You make a good point. I was intrigued until I visited his site. He was simply looking for a ranking account to tweet affiliate links from…which reveals how little he knew about Twitter to begin with. I don’t think any account will last long if all the owner does is tweet spam.
You drive a very hard bargain. A notary AND a sheriff!
The amount of money should not impact the ethical decision – and that’s exactly what it is. If you sell a website you are selling the content, but on Twitter with the exception of obvious corporate sites you’d be selling the trust that you have built up – the belief that what the account tweets is coming from you.
That aside, surely everyone reading this is curious – how much were you offered?
Hi David, so the only way for it to work would be to do as Blath says and sell the website as well?
From some hysterical experiences with online dating, I’ve come to learn that many “accounts” are not backed by the person you’d imagine (A story for The Dating Papers, not here, though).
Not enough to make it worth selling my voice. =)
Frankly I don’t see it working at all, even if you did sell the site with it – it’d be like trying to sell your personality.
Could you imagine trying to sell everything you’ve said publicly, plus your address book, over the last several years?
I agree!
I like the image your questions conjures. Like running after bits of paper on a windy day. Not going to happen! =)
I don’t think I could sell my twitter account. It’s something I am working extremely hard on. It would be like stripping me of my identity. Plus, you’re right…people might be somewhat hesitant to add you in the future if they knew you had “sold” them out.
I think the “work” is why there’s appeal for some to purchase instead of put the effort in.
It would have been possible to do it without anybody knowing they’d been “sold out” but that’s not the point. My big issue is that some people might actually take these guys up on their offer and the faces we think we know have been sold without anybody knowing.
I get the biggest kick out of Twitter. Awesome people. The 20 questions game tonight? Amazing. Just regular fun with people all over the world. WTF would I sell that!?!
I wouldn’t. =)
i think if you gave in to something like this and sold your twitter account.. its only a matter of time before you want more money.. what would you sell next?
Granted you don’t know a large portion of your ‘followers’ bust most follow because they value your opinion and it would be a huge trust violation, and next to impossible to rebuild a list of trustworthy networkers in the future if you had this type of sale hanging over your head.
Exactly. But do you think that’s a feeling shared by many? Especially in the marketing sector?
I’m very much into establishing trust and staying true to a message. It was interesting to consider this question when it came up though because so many people have yet to see a huge amount of value in Twitter and would jump at the money. yes?
I could never sell this name. Have had it since early 90’s online
And yes. you form relationships based on these names if you are not just wearing a costume. Cannot even imagine it at this stage.
It’s an amazing handle. Says so many things without uttering one of them! =)
No costume here, sir!
(I think this is where you asked me to put this)
When you ordered a car from Bugatti, it was, of course, built by hand. In the last few weeks before it was ready, the buyer would come to Molsheim to be literally fitted to the car and stay at Ettore’s castle as a guest. One customer was a reigning European monarch (I don’t know which one, will have to research this), but Ettore was didn’t like him and was so horrified by his table manners that he sent him home without the car.
Seriously? That’s incredible!
A Bugatti is my dream car…meaning I dream of having a friend who buys one and lets me use it a few weekends per year. =)
As I tell my daughter, trust once lost is almost impossible to regain and your most valuable possession is your reputation… so it all comes down to why you’re on Twitter. If you’re here because you want relationships and not just mindless prattle, then you did the right thing.
Feels good, too, doesn’t it? (Glad you didn’t sell me, since your weird-ass questions make me laugh at least once a day.)
Yes, I’m here for conversations and to build relationships with new people across the globe.
Weird-ass questions? ahha. I thought I’d toned them down a bit lately! I love getting all the different responses. We have a good time, you and I!
I’m with you. Let them build their own conversations with themselves echoing nonsense dribble for their spammed masses to digest…. or better yet, tell them you’ll sell it to them for what it would cost for them to run a 30 second ad during the Super Bowl.
Peace
Jenn
Ahh, so you do see a specific number that would be worth the exchange? Considering the number, I’d be sorely tempted as well!
“echoing nonsense dribble for their spammed masses” <—the counter-manual to many MLM schemes? ahha! Nicely done.
“How much is Twitter worth to me?” Well, let’s see, it’s 2:31 in the morning, I have some rough writing ahead of me before I can turn in, and I’m looking for my good friend, Seth, on Twitter to chat with. And if instead, I find a marketing bot trying to sell me something off of his name, well, I’d be pissed … and lonely.
Although, if he sold his account for the value of a Superbowl commercial, well, it would be hard to blame him.
Which makes me that much happier that you didn’t, Seth. Twitter is pretty cool to me. It’s one of the wonders of social media. And Seth, if I ever get a Bugatti Veyron, I’ll be happy to lend it to you from time to time.
yeah, they’d have to turn the bot up to “extremely random” in order to get even close to natural for me. =)
You just made my day with the Veyron offer.
I sort of see it the same way as with musicians who sell their songs for ad campaigns…you work really hard (for a pittance) to make your music and build your fan base, and occasionally (if you’re lucky) someone will offer you buckets and buckets of money just to use a part of one song, in a campaign that’ll last 3 or 4 months, if that. If those buckets of money will keep you fed and housed long enough to write and produce an album’s worth of great new songs, how do you say no? And why wouldn’t your real fans forgive you?
That said, I can’t imagine that the guy could have possibly been offering what your Twitter account is actually worth, in terms of advertising dollars. And to make the deal worth it to you, he’d have had to offer what it’s worth AND enough to feed and house you long enough to rebuild your glorious empire of a network. The number I’m thinking of has a heck of a lot of zeroes attached to the end of it.
Of course, it’s a horrible deal for the buyer no matter how much he pays you, because you can’t buy trust. Once your followers realized it wasn’t you, the account would essentially be worthless.
My glorious empire? Mel, seriously. You’d be on the case in an instant if it weren’t me. You have an uncanny ability to even detect mood shifts in my comments on Twitter.
I think you’ve hit it precisely in noting that you can’t purchase trust. A lot of the marketers currently getting their feet wet in mediums like Twitter seem to be finding that the tactics that might have worked in a slow-mo marketplace don’t hold up as well in new media. It’s a leveling of the playing field that I think is rather nice.
This is the first stage of what I see as a wave of branding issues coming to Twitter. For example, there are people using @disney in some context, which I’m pretty sure the Disney people will get hip to real soon. Anytime you use someone’s brand (or name) you are speaking on behalf of the brand. in the @disney case, they’ll more than likely put a cease and desist order on their name across all SM. As for why someone would want your name – i can only think it is to somehow capitalize off of your followers. Somehow. Even though it wouldn’t be you any longer. Think of the power of SM this way – when I tweeted how much I like @traderjoes last night, nearly a thousand people saw this positive endorsement. That helps @traderjoes, no? Sure it does. Even if it’s for something as simple as someone going there for the first time because someone on Twitter talked about how much they like it. For the record tho, my wife goes there (not me).
So far, Twitter has been great about allowing real brands to take over their names when they ask for it. Sending out a cease-and-desist as you mention could have major blow-back because the way they’d need to write it in order to stop Twitter accounts would result in harming other genuine fan bases. Weheartwinniethepoo.com would have to shut down.
The recent debacle with Ford trying a similar stunt to regain some control over brand usage is a great example of how things can go awry quickly.
Yes it helps Trader Joes for you to tweet positive reviews about them. (Thanks for the disclosure, btw. ahha!) If you get a chance to read my previous post about Brand Advocates, I think you’ll agree that we’re on the same page with the branding issue.
It’s going to be an interesting 10 months ahead!
Yeah, I agree with you about trying to lasso brand names. But Disney’s a whole different animal. I’ll be curious to see what they do going forward. They’re pretty tight-fisted with their brand.
With good reason! They’ve built something massively popular and the more control they can retain, the better.
And yet, being too tight-fisted can also cause problems as it’s then very difficult for up-and-comers to easily identify with the brand as they share a perspective on it.
Do you see a middle ground?
With Disney? Ha. No. And don’t get me wrong, we love Disney, and Disney owns us, but their brand is so powerful that when @disneyblog tweets that they’re at Universal Studios, I think Disney might think that’s a conflict of interest. Who knows where the ownership of naming will go in the future. Certainly sites like weheartwinniethepooh.com makes it a very treacherous, and interesting, road – for all of us.
The most weird thing to me about this is that the account name is YOUR name. If it was maybe a handle you’d made up just for twitter, or the name of a service this guy wanted to use, then it’s worth considering. But this seems too much like selling your name in a way that would certainly hurt your reputation in the future (“this twitterbot is Seth Simonds? He sucks!”).
If he really wanted to make a deal, he perhaps could have contacted you and asked if you would be willing to send out X tweets that include links from him per day, to your followers. You could tell them to expect this or it could be on the DL. Seems like that would be the better deal for him, bc as you said, once it’s JUST spam, there will be massive unfollowing.
Good point.
As that’s the most workable solution right now, I think we’ll begin to see more of it happening. Then, just like there was an outrage over Chris Brogan and his Kmart post but not about all the other bloggers doing similar things…we’ll have a massive Witch Hunt for all the twitter users who advertise without disclosing the tweet as such.
sell your twitter account?! sounds creepy and if your gut says don’t do it…then don’t. always trust your instincts!
Don’t worry, Roslyn, I didn’t sell anything. It brought up an interesting stream of questions for me though.
It’s healthy to wonder where all this is headed and make big-picture decisions before the stream of little choices requiring compromise begin to flow in at record pace!
I guess I don’t get Twitter as well as I thought I did. Why would someone want to purchase your Twitter account? For your high volume of followers? Don’t they realized once your account is no longer being administrated by you (ie – not you Tweeting) people will realize this an unfollow them? I mean – the reason I follow people is to read their tweets. Esp. when they have great Valentine’s Day dating advice!! With Titter being a community as well as a marketplace (and learning center and IT Support desk and all the other things we all help each other with) selling your Twitter account would be like selling your personality. Just my 2cents….
Aw, thanks Loreen! How did your Valentine’s Day go, btw?
I don’t think he realized that, no. It’s indicative of how many old-school marketers are struggling to enter new media and making some mistakes along the way.
Wow. Never entered my mind to sell my account. Would never dream of doing so. Its not even about the followers gained, its about the value it has in my daily life. I dont use it for business, I use it for personal connection. Its like asking how much it would cost to give up my place in my friendships.
@jesskry
It hadn’t entered mine until I was given the opportunity. Much of life is like that, no?
I derive so much value from my experience and conversations that the choice was made as soon as it was available. Still, I wonder about others. Will we soon see a rash of accounts that simply switch over to another person without notice?
I think connections are great. I do, I have made lots and some are very real. But do you ever really know who is behind the avatar and the “account”?? Twitter is about marketing pure and simple. We’re all out there marketing something – some are just more forward about it then others.
Kudos for not selling your account but hey – it’s going to be happening. We may never really know if and when it does.
Perhaps Twitter is only about marketing for you. That’s not the case for many others.
Take a little survey to see how many personal blogs have suffered content-wise because people spend so much time on Twitter. They’re not about brand or marketing, they’re about enjoying connections.
I think it’s possible to do all of those at the same time. We can talk about business, we can “build trust” as it were through conversations, and sometimes…just maybe, we can just enjoy the conversation.
I know I do!
My 2 cents? Simple… I follow you because you are you and I’m interested in knowing more about who you are, what you like, etc. I think it’s called “relationship” or something like that. It’s nice to feel connected to the real person behind the name/website/business, know what I mean?
If you tweeted me and told me that someone was buying your account and you were starting over… I would unfollow the old you and follow the new you instead
Thanks, Joanne! I’d do the same. Let me know if it happens! =)
Yes, it is a relationship. So many people shy away from calling it such because there might be professional or financial “motives” that come into play on occasion. There are varying levels of relationships and I’m part of a broad range through my experience on Twitter. I’ve found ways to appreciate them all. I even learn something from the aggressive MLM blokes on occasion. Most of them have so much heart and I respect that even if I don’t approve of their methods.
What I like best about this post is that you Tagged it under TRUST. Clearly your response to that email shows your integrity and your KLT Factor. Building relationships on know-like and trust is essential to real success. Obviously, your path is well marked! Kudos to you and, as a follower, thank you.
@kltfactor
@bestreflections
Thank you for your kind words, Tina! I’m among those who believe that trust is very important in building a sustainable relationship of any sort. I’m glad we’re a pair. =)
To quote you Seth:
“Take a little survey to see how many personal blogs have suffered content-wise because people spend so much time on Twitter. They’re not about brand or marketing, they’re about enjoying connections.”
I can attest to the folks spending time on Twitter, and it’s pissing me off!
And try as I might to pull ‘em out of Twitter and back to Blogs, they just don’t want to.
At least not yet, I haven’t given up quite yet…
Apparently your one of the good guys, based on what I have read here.
Power to the Bloggers!
ZuD
Perhaps you misunderstood me.
There are many people who started blogs as a way of connecting only to find that Twitter offered them a more satisfying connection than there blog did…or perhaps ever will.
The rest will come in time. As soon as the initial delight of the new application wears off, they’ll come stumbling home from the wild party and get back to pushing content. Sometimes quality. Sometimes not.
We take the bad with the good, right?
Love your passion, brother. Already hit up your blog. Great story about Shaq!
Your very smooth response is appreciated as well as your visiting my humble Blog.
I surely can’t be alone in this, there must be others who recognize 140 characters can’t possibly tell one much.
I will await the party revelers return with open arms and a funny story to tell…
Holy S…!
What don’t people come up with anymore? Absolutely no sale! For one thing I would never sell my heart and soul to someone who is ignorant and entirely devoid of understanding quality over quantity! Not to mention marrying authenticity into the whole mix!
I am rarely incandescent with rage but this has got my veins disintegrating from the heat of my boiling blood! Bleh!
Good thing you didn’t or I would come after you, ping pong balls and all! :~) lol!
“I live to give, not live to get!” ~Henie~
Oh, Henie, if only the world were filled with more honest artists like yourself! As it is, I don’t think he quite understood what Twitter is about and therefore made what, to him, seemed like a reasonable suggestion.
Incandescent rage? That is a new one for me. I really like it! Not that you’re mad, but the description. It’s perfect! Please don’t disintegrate!
I know you would. I know you’d come after me with ping pong balls. Don’t worry. I’m being good. =)