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User “Microsoft Incentives” Wants to be Your Friend, Too

Red tail hawk
Big awesome Microsoft is still twitting



Summary: Another potential Microsoft AstroTurfer in Twitter

LAST WEEK we posted proof that Microsoft would be giving gifts to bloggers and to users of social networks (e.g. Digg, Reddit, Slashdot) in order for them to rave about Windows. Microsoft is of course doing it via agencies and agents whom it hires. Waggener Edstrom is the biggest such agency [1, 2], but it's not the only one. Microsoft is employing companies to pollute Twitter with its marketing buzz and also to track users and messages [1, 2, 3, 4].



Yesterday I received the following message by E-mail: "Microsoft Incentives (msincentives) is now following your updates on Twitter."

Wow! Yay.

“Twitter accounts for offering of gifts (bribes) to 'fans' of Microsoft would make perfect sense now that we have evidence of them hiring agencies for such jobs.”Mr. (or Mrs.) Microsoft Incentives must really be interested in twits about GNU/Linux and occasionally some politics.

This is obviously one of those spammy Twitter accounts which are just 'whoring' everyone, hoping to earn some attention in return (mutual following) and usually just pointing to bot-powered marketing messages.

We know that Microsoft has a similar Twitter account for MSPs (maybe it's not directly affiliated with Microsoft), but none of this should be too surprising. Twitter accounts for offering of gifts (bribes) to 'fans' of Microsoft would make perfect sense now that we have evidence of them hiring agencies for such jobs [1, 2, 3, 4].

Tread carefully out there.

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