TwitHawk - Twitter & Social Media Targeted Marketing

Press Release - Jan 7th 2009

Today, the owner of TwitterHawk, Chris Duell - released a statement about recent community discussion on whether TwitterHawk was a SPAM based service or not.

"First of all, we do not in any way condone using TwitterHawk for aggressive SPAM based marketing tactics to harass or annoy people with advertising material on a regular basis.

With that said, we acknowledge that notifying someone of relevant information or services based on their tweet content may in fact add value to their twitter experience. We view this in the same way that Google Adwords provides non intrusive offers to users based on the keywords they told Google about - but without this being forced upon them or annoying them.

Therefore, in the spirit of allowing contact with people for relevant, targeted information but not wanting to annoy them with harassing advertising, we have just put in place further restrictions on the use of TwitterHawk, the frequency of messages has been reduced to allowing only one per 6 hours per twitter account, unless a prior agreement is made with the user and TwitterHawk.

We may in fact increase these restrictions again in future based on our observation of Twitterhawk account owners if we believe that the service is being abused or causing the Twitter community unwanted problems.

We did not expect such in explosion on use of the tool and considerably underestimate it's effect on the social medium. Which is why our number one focus right now is ensuring that Twitterhawk adds value to all those who come in contact with the service."

More SPAM protection measures will be being put in place in the comings days.

Accounts that abuse the TwitterHawk service will be banned from use and possibly reported to twitter.com (if you notice any such activity, please report them)

*TwitterHawk reserves the right to change the frequency of auto replies being sent at any time.