Is Your Account For Sale? Andrew Baron’s Twitter Account On eBay

Is selling your social network community account like selling a car, a house or a business? Can it be a simple transaction for some cold hard cash? Christopher Penn has a post giving the example of credit bureaus selling a list of names in their database to lend support to the idea of selling a large community account database. Is the credit bureaus selling lists of names any different than what Andrew Baron has done by posting his Twitter account for sale on eBay?

I say yes.

Yes, because of the intimate nature of a social network community like Twitter. Of course I could just unfollow and block him (or whoever) from following me. There is a bigger issue involved in this action. Trust. I trust the folks I've chosen to follow with trivial and sometimes not so trivial aspects to my life. On a daily basis we communicate bits and pieces of our lives. Now I have to wonder if the person I developed a relationship within a community will still be the same person later.

It is true that Andrew could have sold his account without informing anyone beforehand. Had he done so the new owner of the account could have wielded considerable influence. Recipients of the tweets would be none the wiser to the change in ownership. I do applaud his choice to be transparent, including the community in the sale. In a sense allowing us to be part of the process through the conversations, comments and tweets during the auction.

At the same time I am not crazy about the place this takes us the social networking community. We all know there are spammers who have discovered sites like Twitter. They're the ones who are talking at us and not with us. Following 3000+ people with only have a few hundred following back. You can spot them a mile away because their tweets have links in every single one of their posts. So database mining, linking, selling isn't new to Twitter. What is new is having someone with "com­mu­nity cred” put a For Sale By Owner sign on their per­sonal social net­work­ing com­mu­nity account.

Other than trust, another thing that comes to mind is the sell­ing of a com­mu­nity when it is tied so closely to your per­sonal brand. A busi­ness brand is one thing. If you sold your busi­ness then it would stand to rea­son that all prop­er­ties (real or vir­tual) would be trans­ferred to the new owner. So if you sell your Twit­ter account what about your other com­mu­nity accounts? What about Pownce, Plaxo, LinkedIn or Face­book accounts? Are those also for sale in a sep­a­rate auction?

What if the high­est bid­der is an entity that pro­motes things that are the polar oppo­site to your own beliefs. Say you are a “I’d rather go naked than wear fur” per­son and the new owner is a “Baby seals make the best fur coats” per­son. Do you want that tied to your per­sonal brand?

My own thoughts are that such an action dimin­ishes the value of social net­work com­mu­ni­ties. The true power of these com­mu­ni­ties is their inti­mate and per­sonal nature. The folks I’ve met through Twit­ter are folks with whom I have enjoyed inter­act­ing. I have devel­oped a sense of who they are and they of me. I have had the plea­sure of meet­ing quite a few of the folks from my Twit­ter com­mu­nity. The power of the social net­work com­mu­nity is fur­ther enhanced by these face-to-face meet­ings. As of yet, I have not been dis­ap­pointed or sur­prised. Every­one has been exactly who they are on Twit­ter. Even though we are meet­ing for the first time, it’s like I’m meet­ing with an old friend. So now take that dynamic and put it up on the auc­tion block for sale to the high­est bid­der. How exactly does that translate?

I under­stand that Andrew left a com­ment on Chris Brogan’s blog that the auc­tion of his Twit­ter account on eBay is an exper­i­ment. So per­haps the sale of the account isn’t real but a gim­mick or per­haps research mate­r­ial. The auc­tion ends in 10 days. I am sure there will be many blog posts, arti­cles and debate sur­round­ing this long after the auc­tion is com­plete. One thing for sure, Andrew Baron has cer­tainly stirred things up.

Tags: andrew baron, Social Networking, Twitter