Marketing Insights and Analysis
Guy Kawasaki is an Evil, Narcisisstic Spammer (or maybe not)
24Mar2009 Filed under: 2009, Analysis Author: RobTwitter has been described as a venue for narcisisstic personalities. There have been several posts about the different personality types on Twitter, but the one thing with which everyone seems to agree is Guy Kawasaki is an evil, narcisisstic Twitter spammer.
Guy recently posted the following tweet:
Been a big week: called a dick at SXSW, spammer all over the world, and unethical bec of ghostwitters. But the Habs won!
10:38 PM Mar 23rd from twhirl
In tweeting with @adamkmiec and @johnnywon, we wanted a better way of assessing the self-centered vanity of fellow Tweeps. We came up with the unscientific but official looking Twitter Narcisissim (or Twitisissm) index (TI). TI is comprised of three weighted measures:
- Self centeredness. This is the ratio of ‘follower’ to ‘following’. People that have high follower counts but don’t feel like they should follow others will have a high number.
- Ego. The number of tweets you’ve averaged per day. If you are constantly tweeting for attention, this will be a high number.
- Vanity. How many external links are pointing to your Twitter profile? This will be a high number if you are actively promoting your Twitter profile on other sites.
We weighted these three measures at 60%, 30% and 10% respectively. Ego was weighted to avoid bias to time issues with ego. Vanity was weighted lower as some external links are outside the users control.
Guy Kawasaki is a prolific Twitterer, with over 90k followers and 20k tweets over a 272 day period. But how does that compare to other Twitterers?
The Data
Using this methodology, I have compared several popular and less popular Twitterers and generated some interesting findings.
| Tweep | Self Centered | Ego | Vanity | Twitisissm Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| @adamkmiec | 55.7 | 97.1 | 99.1 | 72.5 |
| @RobSaker | 39.2 | 95.1 | 50.0 | 57.0 |
| @Johnnywon | 0 | 84.1 | 75.0 | 32.7 |
| @ConversationAge | 84.3 | 97.2 | 99.5 | 89.7 |
| @GuyKawasaki | 0 | 98.6 | 99.9 | 39.5 |
| @AnnHandley | 0 | 97.0 | 99.8 | 39.0 |
| @KevinRose | 99.9 | 87.9 | 99.8 | 96.3 |
| @AntonioCapo | 14.2 | 94.5 | 99.5 | 46.8 |
| @SavvyAuntie | 64.3 | 98.0 | 99.5 | 77.9 |
| @StephenTColbert | 42.8 | 0 | 80.0 | 33.7 |
| @mashable | 99.4 | 98.0 | 99.9 | 99.0 |
| @The_Real_Shaq | 99.8 | 87.2 | 99.9 | 96.1 |
From this table we see that @KevinRose had the highest “self-centered” rating, at 99.9. That is a result of having nearly 350k followers while following only 160 people. @GuyKawasaki and others had zeros in this measure because they reciprocated as many or more follows than they received.
This was not the case for Ego. @GuyKawasaki had the highest ego rating at 98.6, just ahead of @SavvyAuntie and @mashable. Ego is calculated in TI by the average number of times the person tweets per day (the desire to see their own postings on Twitter). StephenTColbert tweets on average less than 1 time per day, providing him a zero score here.
There was a three-way tie for the TI Vanity ranking between @The_Real_Shaq, @mashable and @GuyKawasaki. Vanity is factored by the number of external links pointing to your Twitter profile. In at least one post, this was mentioned as an important step in gaining Twitter followers.
What does the information mean?
The TI was quickly created to provide a way of evaluating Tweeps in comparison to each other. Some Tweeps like Twitter for the broadcast perspective, while others find it beneficial to have conversation with smaller groups of people.
This table does quickly disprove the “@GuyKawasaki is an evil, narcisstic spammer theory.” If he were a spammer, he would only broadcast tweets. He does tweet frequently, but he engages in conversation and follows more people than follow him. I have a higher total TI score than @GuyKawasaki. If his tweets disturb you,you need only to unfollow him to avoid them.
What is a healthy score? I believe this must be determined in context with your objective. @SavvyAuntie tweets frequently in support of the www.savvyauntie.com web site, and I’ve never heard anyone accuse her of Twitter spam. It’s appropriate that she tweets this frequently, and she engages in conversation with other Tweeps on a regular basis.
So @GuyKawasaki is not an evil Twitter spammer… although I’ve heard AllTop is a secret conspiracy to control news on the Interweb.
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- Tags: analytics, ego, Guy Kawasaki, spam, twitisissm, twitter, twitter spam
5 Responses to “Guy Kawasaki is an Evil, Narcisisstic Spammer (or maybe not)”
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About this blog
Information is essential in generating good insights, but it cannot be a crutch in making decisions. The posts here are intended to explore and are not perfect, but that's part of the point.
Rob
March 25th, 2009 at 8:31 am
I was asked what I thought a good score is. I think anything up to around 90 is fine. I do have concerns with people who have extremely high scores. There are those whose goal is to “get the most visitors”. I think that is twitisissm as it indicates they’re using twitter only to broadcast messages.
@kdoohan
March 25th, 2009 at 9:58 am
Like it. Nice work. Especially appreciate the thought you three put into it.
The thing that bugs me is that so many of us have the need to classify users and uses of social media. “This is a bad use of Twitter”, “This is a good use of Twitter”, “this person has a high signal/noise ratio”, “that guy lives in the echo chamber”, “social media is clubby and exclusive (in a bad way), etc..
I think there is no “correct or appropriate” use of any of these tools. If you want to broadcast tweet..do it! If you want to have a conversation, cool. Everyone has the right to choose whether to follow me or not and I can use tools as I like. That’s the way (uh-huh, uh-huh) I like it (uh-huh, uh-huh).
Thanks for sharing. It made me curious what my score was. Which I guess is maybe an ego trap like @peterkim often refers to.
Colin Doughan
March 27th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
still interested in your thoughts on organizing Tweets using automation. good work. like the blog. as always you are a little over my head, but i think that is why i like you. keep it coming.
jestebanc
March 31st, 2009 at 2:16 pm
I would like my Twitisissm Score please.
Maybe this is something that could be automatically provided to people? http://www.twitisissm.com maybe?
Robert Davis
April 20th, 2009 at 2:04 am
Hey Rob – like most, Guy is an icon from several phases of my pre-social media career… from the Apple days to the fast company/web startup 1.0 era to today. However, lately Guy's tweet strategies have really been bugging me, and I think there are two factors not accounted for in the TI formula: to what extent do the links you post point only to your own company, and do you manage your own tweets. I was sad to find that (without quantifying, frankly) Guy's tweets more often than not point to Alltop, and what's more, he's got two staffers tweeting for him, as him, without disclosing it on Twitter.
And to your point, I am free to unfollow Guy, and I did – with a great deal of regret. As I say, the guys an icon – but in my very small opinion, an icon sporting some tarnish these days.