On July 26th, 2009, Internet Service Provider AT&T ‘blackholed’ traffic to/from some of the popular boards at 4Chan.org.  This was a surprising move for 2 reasons.

1. AT&T decidedly censored it’s customer base
2. 4Chan.org is made up of some of the most reckless geeks on the Internet, and they’re not afraid to flat out attack a major site or organization.  [NOTE: 4CHAN is certainly not safe for work or for kids. Do not click if you don't already know what it is...]

[NOTE: Blackhole routing, in network terms, means the ISP sent data packets destined for/from 4chan.org nowhere.  The packets would come across the AT&T network en route to it's destination and AT&T simply 'dropped' the packet, never sending it on to it's intended destination, so it's like the packet went into a black hole, never to be seen again by sending PC or destination server.]

Now I’m not a user of 4chan, never have been and never will be. I frankly hate the intellectual divide among it’s members.  It’s pretty un-debatable that there is an infinite chasm of idiocy between a few of 4chan’s most intelligent users and the far more populous douche bag user.  That being said, 4chan’s numbers alone make them pretty formidable when they get pissed off.  Last year, they gamed the Time.com site that allowed users to vote on “person of the year”.  Their pranks/hacks are usually pretty organized and it’s always a few folks at the top of the food chain who lay it out for the other idiots, resulting in sometimes brutal beatings of other websites.  Funny as these beatings usually are (yea, I enjoy it!) they also serve as a pretty big deterrent to other sites/organizations to stay the hell off 4chan’s butt.

So what really happens when a corporate goliath like AT&T decides to block an online supermax prison like 4chan?

Very quickly, 4chan’s IRC channel exploded with activity, mostly “why can’t I see the site?” type posts, and soon after, the Twitterverse (or is it Twatsphere?) became EXCEPTIONALLY busy with people posting their disdain for AT&T, condemning censorship, and throwing a few pedobear jabs out there too.

A quick visit to http://search.twitter.com/search?q=4chan showed me that there were tweets about 4chan happening almost once every 1-2 seconds.  I monitored the search for about 20 mins and I finally decided to try a little social experiment.

I went to twitter and created a new account. I wanted it to be generic, trusthworthy, and obvious as to it’s purpose.  I added the 4chan logo as my avatar, added text to my bio that read something like “Following the AT&T blockade, be sure to follow this account for all the latest news”.  I threw together twitter.com/4chan4ever.  Don’t bother going there now, I’ve since deleted it.  Why?  It was not a branded social account and it didn’t have a lot of longevity. Once this AT&T mess was over, the account would be pretty worthless as folks’ attention would be elsewhere.  It was exactly 24 hours and 15 minutes old when it was euthanized.

Thanks to Ian Fernando and DiggaLive.com, who produced Twitter Snipe, a tool that lets you target twitter users and autofollow them, I was able to start adding users in a highly automated fashion.  Look at their site to see how it works exactly, but the long and short of it is that you create a twitter account, add some keywords to it, and the tool hits search.twitter.com and adds recent people who have tweeted that keyword.

I started the tool against 2 keywords: 4chan, and AT&T. I set the tool to add 500 users of each keyword, and add users every 10 seconds.  Twitter allowed this and after approximately 20 minutes, I had 50 users and 6 followers.  Twitter uses anti-spam processes and long story short, if your following list is grossly higher than your followers list, they’re gonna call you a spammer and likely block your account.  If your followers/following ratio is closer to 1:1, or even if your followers list exceeds your following list, you should be golden and able to add users to your heart’s delight.  There is a cap and some other constraints, but you can research the different ways Twitter controls spam on your own.

So back to my follow ratio, I wanted a 1:1 ratio to avoid being seen as a spammer, but people’s autofollows were just not on.  I was sitting at 12% follow-back which sucks as they only allow you to follow 2000 on twitter unless you have sufficient followers.

How I got them to follow me.

So after the Twitter Snipe tool followed 60 or so people and I had 7 followers, I sent my first tweet: “Big news to come, follow this account for the latest. PLZ retweet” and then the floodgates opened.  I went to 16% following me after 100 people were added, 26% after 200 people were added.  By the time 9 hours had passed, I had 536 people  I was following, (auto followed via Twitter Snipe) and over 1900 people following me back. People were retweeting to their friends on a massive scale.

1900 followers in 9 hours!

By simply telling the folks I was following that 1) Something is happening, 2) They can hear about it from this account, and 3) Tell your friends, I was able to gain trust, give them something they wanted, and build a pretty targeted list of followers.

All total the account had 17 tweets before I deleted it, that’s it.  1900 followers on 17 total tweets.

Did you push any offers and how did the traffic convert?

I posted maybe 8 tweets with actual updates regarding the AT&T mess.  These were truthful, legitimate tweets.  The 9th  tweet I shot out a poll question.  I threw up a quick site using Poll Control, a nice quick and dirty poll script from a buddy on Wickedfire.  Of the 957 people who took the poll, 13 of them converted (1.36%) .  I lost about 40 followers after the poll tweet was sent out.  With email submits having a terrible scrub rate, I figure about 30 or so people actually filled in the form, but who knows.  I thought of collecting the emails myself for a spam campaign, but figured 4chan traffic is shit and didn’t want to waste the time.  In future projects like this, I will FOR SURE be collecting emails on everyone.

Then I got creative. 4chan is known for attacks, so I tweeted “We need dating accounts for an upcoming action, <dating offer link>, don’t make it spammy.”, and linked it to a dating offer.  I know dating offers convert like shit, but I knew this account wouldn’t last long so bizops were out, and since the largely male followers used 4chan, they were likely chronically single! This tweet was heavily retweeted.

At this point people were curious about the previous poll and dating offer and started to unfollow me. I was down to 1840 followers after the dating offer tweet and folks were starting to ask what was up, or just ignore my tweet completely.  The click rate on the dating offer was also a lot lower at 699 clicks and 4 conversions (0.57%).

As with all Drama Llama situations, the AT&T vs. 4Chan fight came to an anti-climactic end when AT&T unblocked the traffic. They only blocked it because of a technical issue and quite frankly, no one gives a shit anymore, so deleting the twitter account was maybe not the best thing, but whatever.

Conclusion

This little experiment was a positive success in my book.  I found an unfilled niche (Users wanted to know updates on the 4chan thing), I gave them something they wanted (Juicy details of a pending attack) and told them how to do it (Follow me for more updates).

It wasn’t until I did all 3 of those things that the mass following of my account happened.

Next project: The Jonas Brothers Are Gay

Why pick on a few teen beat coverboys?  No reason whatsoever aside from the above topic falls into the same category the AT&T vs. 4Chan topic fell under: CONTROVERSY

Here are some themes/methods I will use for future projects involving Twitter:

1. Captive audience – Do these people really care about the topic?
2. Vocal audience – Will the people who follow me interact with me and retweet my posts?
3. Branding – Can present my Twitter account as a brand, not just another jerkoff Twitter user?
4. Engagement – How do these people want to be serviced, spoken to, and listened to?
5. Marketability – Can these people be marketed to? Will they use a credit card at best, or not enter an email at worst?
6. Profitability – Can I build this account to a trusted level that people will continually click on my links and believe that I’m doing them a favor or telling them of some secret Gem of the Internet product/offer?

I’m interested to see how you view this case study. Please feel free to drop a comment below.

And that’s that.

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