When a Gaggle Goes Rogue

Posted on June 29, 2012 Written by

I know a few people who have experimented with automated sharing services, and I am often not a fan of them. I understand why people would band together in hopes of amplifying their reach, and I understand that it is possible to have enough faith and trust in others that you don’t end up auto-endorsing something you wish you didn’t.

GaggleAmp is a tool that’s seen an increase in use and exposure, and the idea is that users sign into a dashboard and are presented with suggested messages they can quickly auto-tweet or auto-post to various networks. If you love Hibbett’s Sporting Goods, and you are evangelistic about them, you might sign up for a Hibbett’s Gaggle and share out the things Hibbett’s sends your way.

However, what if you end up amplifying a message that’s no longer important or relevant.

Gaggle Lagged

Social media consultant J.D. Lasica (@jdlasica) was trying to reach the VP of Community Relations for Pacific Gas and Electric. He sent this tweet at 2:55pm Pacific on a Wednesday:


At 9:16 Thursday morning, @PGE4me replied:

(Update: J.D. tells me that he did not Tweet that any differently than any other, just his normal workflow through HootSuite.)

This is where it gets interesting. JD hasn’t been active on his Twitter account since that time, except for a single tweet about Olympic trials around 10:30 Wednesday night. However, the echoes of his original complaint have continued through GaggleAmp:


Chris Abraham’s tweet was the first one I noticed, and I naturally assumed he was the one having the issue. I didn’t even know Lasica was involved.

Paul Parmley is my counterpart at PG&E – I sent him the tweet from Chris, and he replied again to Lasica:


Yet the Gaggles continued…


…including this one that popped up while I was still aggregating this post!

Gaggle a-GoGo

I don’t know enough to know what the solution ought to be. Maybe J.D. has a solid gripe about not getting attention. But was GaggleAmp the appropriate tool for that? Is there a way to yank back a Gaggle once it’s been set in motion? Do the people deeper in the chain deserve some blame for sharing without even checking to see if @pge4me is indeed engaging?

I know there are a lot of upsides to automation. This isn’t one of them. (and yes, I do know that at least one person will auto-share this post via Gaggle… I hope I don’t let you down.)

(image credit: Larry WFU on Flickr)

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Comments

  1. JR Schmitt (@cloudspark) says
    June 29, 2012 at 3:19 pm

    Ike –

    Automation in communication kills the very essence of authenticity.

    What happens when auto-efforts merely create an echo chamber? Do we create a whole world where everyone thinks they are saying something but no one pays attention,no one listens. Will it be two worlds? Our social media avatars pretending in an online realm while our real selves congratulates us on our efforts at being so social.

    Let’s hope that technology increases our reasons for connecting instead of merely creating “valuable content” that no one notices.

    • Ike says
      June 29, 2012 at 3:38 pm

      I totally agree — and in this case, why would you want to echo someone else’s individual complaint?

  2. Donna Papacosta says
    June 29, 2012 at 3:33 pm

    Wow, this is a very poor use of GaggleAmp. I would never fully automate tweets, especially when an account is used to lodge complaints. I look to the FIR podcast as an example of how to use Gaggle well: Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson use GaggleAmp to tease out show content. It looks like they generate many retweets, and these tweets serve a specific purpose.

    • Ike says
      June 29, 2012 at 3:41 pm

      Thanks Donna.

      I flagged Shel on this, because I know how successful GaggleAmp has been for them. But when you Gaggle a tease for a podcast, it’s still good information a week or two later. When you Gaggle something like this, it may be expired (or worse) before it is shared.

      J.D. never intended for this to happen — and if any of the subsequent Gagglers had done a simple check, they would have noticed that @pge4me was engaging. Yet that type of verify-before-you-click behavior runs against the very nature of Frictionless Sharing. That’s part of the inherent danger I want to bring some attention to.

  3. Chris Abraham says
    June 29, 2012 at 6:06 pm

    Hi Ike, I want to fall on my sword for this one. I am the one who was rogue. I am the one who had been farting around with an account at GaggleAMP and I wanted to see “what she could do” — and started with @marcon but then I broke up with AH and so I moved the gaggle to being @biznology but then JD asked me about what this was all about (however, I don’t believe he understood how it worked and I didn’t do a very good job of informing him).

    So, it started out oh so innocently but then it really started to work and then all of a sudden over 225 folks are part of my gaggle and I really wasn’t ready for how it was all going to work.

    I started using it because I like how I could automagically retweet the FIR alerts for Shel “frictionlessly” and that was all well and good — and it kept growing and scaling and growing.

    The problem happened when I turned on the twitter accounts for @biznology and @jdlasica — at that point, the tweets were not just packaged content, they were personal, intimate, and timely tweets (as in your example, which is a personal request from JD to the world).

    So, it is obvious that JD did not know what was happening and how it was set up — and neither do Mike and Eileen over at @biznology.

    What I was doing was taking GaggleAMP “off prescription” and off road and, to mix my metaphors completely, I strapped myself into a G-suit and tried to see what happens when you break the sound barrier.

    And while there hasn’t been any breaks until now, there have been warnings — and today there was a break — and I take full responsibility on this — it was really fun and interesting and a real blast to see all of this mount and build and AMPLIFY but enough’s enough.

    Glenn is going to help me break this Gaggle into separate Biznology.com and Socialmedia.biz gaggles.

    I have also turned off all the “auto-tweet” settings.

    And, I am sorry to you and your client, Ike. I meant no harm but I was really having some fun opening such an amazing tool up on the highway that it was just a matter of time before I got tagged for aggressive driving.

    I really liked this post — but I also must apologize to Glenn Gaudet and to JD Lasica as well — sorry guys.

  4. Shel Holtz says
    June 29, 2012 at 6:32 pm

    This is odd, to say the least. It doesn’t seem from JD’s original tweet was a GaggleAmp message. What I want to know is how it got into a Gaggle. Very strange.

  5. Glenn Gaudet says
    June 29, 2012 at 8:29 pm

    Ike, thanks for raising this issue. Allow me to extend an invitation to you to show you GaggleAMP. I’d love your feedback and ideas.

    • Ike says
      June 29, 2012 at 8:40 pm

      I’d love to take a look at it, Glenn. And I must reiterate that I really did just stumble across this, looking out for my colleagues at PG&E. Had no idea what I had found at first, but glad I was at least asking the right questions to uncover something helpful.

      I’ll shoot you an email with my contact info. Talk next week?

Trackbacks

  1. How I went rogue with GaggleAMP (and the unintended consquences) by Chris Abraham Because the Medium is the Message — Chris Abraham says:
    June 29, 2012 at 7:09 pm

    […] (@chrisabraham) June 29, 2012I had a warning yesterday, before Ike Pigott‘s recent blog post, When a Gaggle Goes Rogue. The below tweet wasn’t mine, it was @JDLasica‘s — and yet his tweet came across […]