Last week I wrote about Twitter’s upcoming hospitality to targeted advertising, and what this means for its users (almost definitely a dystopian nightmare). But Twitter is strangely inhospitable to advertisers in other ways – making a branded account something of a liability.
Branded accounts only have the same security as the rest of us – just the one username and password. As a result, a growing number of official accounts have fallen victim to hacking. Last week it was Burger King, which got taken over by Anonymous-affiliated hackers. It was soon branded with the Mcdonalds logo and issuing tweets like this:
We just got sold to McDonalds! Look for McDonalds in a hood near you @DFNCTSC
And then earlier this year there was the HMV clusterfuck, courtesy of some employees in the process of being fired. From the official account:
There are over 60 of us being fired at once! Mass execution, of loyal employees who love the brand. #hmvXFactorFiring,
Sorry we’ve been quiet for so long.Under contract, we’ve been unable to say a word, or – more importantly – tell the truth.
Just overheard our Marketing Director (he’s staying, folks) ask ‘How do I shut down Twitter?’
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It’s also happened, in various ways, to Jeep, NBC News, USA Today and Donald Trump, and all of those incidents were likewise funny. The thing is that official Twitter accounts are nigh on irresistible to hackers. There’s something of the getting-down-with-the-kids about branded Twitter accounts, with their ulterior motivated chattiness and their thinly veiled desperation, and it’s always tempting to remind them that they’re still not really one of us.
So should Twitter be doing more to protect these accounts? At the moment it is running several paid options for advertisers – none of which include the option to up their security. But then why should it offer this? It would be a canny move to introduce it only later in the game, when more hacker attacks have increased the fear, and companies have accumulated more followers, raising the stakes.
The trouble is that at the moment this potential revenue is being siphoned off by third parties like Hootsuite, whose products let you manage your account a little more securely, and which get a boost everytime a company is publicly hacked. Unsurpisingly therefore, last Wednesday Twitter introduced a product facilitating ad promotion through third parties like this. It looks like the start of a move to finally get offical accounts a little safer. But is Twitter too late to the party, or too early? Either way, it’s starting to twig, and potential hackers better get a move on with their hilarious stunts, before it’s too late.
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