Recently, we wrote a quick article on YoBird and, their plan to gain as much hype as possible by using social media outlets. In specific we were focusing on their use of Twitter and the massive number of people they were following. Over the past week we have been speaking with Yobird and, conducting an e-mail based interview.

If you look at the site, you will see a countdown to their launch day. Originally, TGM was going to do an article on the company itself and, what they are about. However, things changed when YoBird posted information about their Twitter account being banned. This was when our curiosity was piqued even more. Our questions began to be a little more direct, curious as to whether Yobird was an actual company or, possibly a Twitter competitor. Or, was this a marketing experiment for another company.

The following is part of the Q&A we exchanged with YoBird;

TGM: “Is this just a big marketing experiment? If it is..can we hear a bit more about that? ”

YoBird: “Lately Twitter has been, slow, buggy and unstable, and in their explanation they indirectly lay the fault on people with a lot of Followers and Following. Before i started Yobird, i used Twitter as a person expression channel. I realized Twitter was the perfect way to share what we were doing without having to write a full blog post about it. It really annoyed me that Twitter was and is down all the time, and many of it’s it features are disabled. I thought to myself, why wouldn’t they just set a limit on Followers and Following, nobody has that many friends anyway. Or they could, like many other social sites, have a free and pro account, like for example Flickr. Many has complained to Twitter, but nothing much has been done, it’s a slow progress, and they have said that the only way to fully restore the system is to either rewrite the whole thing in C++ or something instead of Ruby on Rails, or buy a lot more servers. A complete rewrite will take a lot of time, and since Twitter is free, i doubt they can afford a whole lot of new servers. This way, unless they think of something really smart, we’ll have unstable for a long time. My idea was to show them how easy it was to get the most followings on Twitter in just some weeks. I hoped this would give them an idea and maybe force them to at least think about limiting something. This was also done to get some boost and chatter about Yobird. How i did it you ask. Simple. I’m no coding geek, i just added the iMacros extension to Firefox and just simulated the adding of friends and set it on loop. A couple of our computer was going at it for some time, and you know the result.”

TGM:“Are you a Twitter competitor? Is your Twitter experiment part of something larger like a viral marketing thing or, a way to generate more people to be interested in Yobird? What exactly is yobird anyway? Do you think you could have been banned from Twitter because of using the macro extension from Firefox? I’m not sure of their terms of service but, a third party extension could have caused a ban possibly? Do you think Twitter got the message?”

YoBird: “We are not competitors of Twitter. We use Twitter in an intuitive way to make and update our user base. The thing with Twitter was only a small stunt, we have some other PR stunts in mind after the launch, so you can maybe call it viral marketing, but i like to think it’s a way to spread our message for free. Yobird is essentially fresh software/web company. We focus on building useful and delicious web services and Windows apps. I daily use both Windows and Mac, and I’ve discovered that even though there are a lot more apps for the Windows platform, they can’t compete in either quality, price or usefulness against Mac apps. Our idea is to bring something useful and free to the Windows platform, something that isn’t awful looking, or just unnecessary. We want to bring something new and useful to both the average user and the pro. Our web services is not going to be in the YouTube size, but smaller and useful.

I still haven’t gotten an answer from Twitter, but they had no right banning our Twitter account, just because we followed so many people. We did not spam anyone and there are a lot of other Twitter users that have almost that many Followings. If Twitter is banning us, they should ban every other user with a lot of Followings. Twitter did not know that we used the iMacros extension. On their part it seemed like someone was adding all the users manually. I haven’t read the terms of service, but i don’t think adding a lot of friends is something they can ban you for. I hope Twitter got the message, and if they blocked us, what can stop us creating another account and add even more friends too it?”

TGM contacted Twitter’s PR with the full e-mail interview we did with YoBird and, explained the situation. Twitter replied to us with the following to explain why this happened; “Hi,Twitter will terminate accounts for a variety of technical abuse violations. We detected a serial creation of relationships consistent with scripting or bot behavior associated with this account. Thanks,Biz “

Candace Holly, TGM’s PR Consultant and someone who specializes in “Neo Public Relations” had this much to say. “What YoBird did was a great idea. The problem is, they messed up in how they did it. This would be like me going on MySpace with a TGM account and mass adding friends. OK I added the friends. But, how am I going to get them to add me back? What kind of a hook am I going to use? What am I offering to them that’s interesting?

A lot of times when people use Twitter and they notice a new follower, they are going to check that new follower to see if anything interesting is going on. If something is, they follow them in return. It’s the same with MySpace and on a smaller scale Facebook. YoBird’s Twitter feed didn’t have a ton of information on it. There wasn’t a huge amount of hype being pushed to the company itself.

This is a really good example of how not to use social networking for PR and Marketing. There’s got to be some kind of hook. Some way to generate interest. YoBird did sort of succeed though…the small-scale fiasco with their Twitter account and, trying to get the message out to Twitter did cause a little bit of a stir. So..they got what they wanted. I just don’t think they got it the way they planned.

As far as TGM is concerned, we’re still keeping tabs on YoBird. Just based on our conversations the company looks like they are going to offer something. We’re all a little confused because our direct questions about the company itself is kind of tight lipped. I’m anxious to see what they are up to. We’ll find out in a few days according to the website. That right there…that’s the hook. They got me curious, hopefully they will get more people curious as well.”

Candace summed it up. We are interested but, we are more interested in how things are going to pan out from here. Stay tuned.