No 3Gguy
Vodafone’s current promotion in New Zealand is a young male (the “3GGuy”) trotting around the country giving away netbooks. They created a Twitter account for the chap, but rather than use that have chosen to spam the Vodafone corporate Twitter account for the duration of the promotion.
Sadly this young chap (and/or his marketing-droid masters) doesn’t seem to understand social media. His first competition was to see who could spam the most.
This has not pleased some folk. Nope. Not at all.
In the Open Source spirit of “if you don’t like it, fix it” I’ve created my first Twitter bot. It parses the @vodafoneNZ Twitter stream and posts all tweets that don’t contain references to 3GGuy to @vfNZno3gguy. The updates aren’t instant, but should come through within half an hour or so.
The filtering is pretty basic at the moment (it’s keyword-based; feel free to suggest modifications in the comments), but will be updated as I’m able.
Again, the 3Gguy-free Twitter feed is at @vfNZno3gguy. I hope this is of use to some folks.
Update: the @vfNZno3gguy account was mentionned by @lancewiggs in his “how NOT to Twitter if you are a corporation” post.