Matt Bacak’s epic social media fail, or it is really?

It’s not often that a link to a press release get circulated around Twitter, but this morning there was one going around, and it wasn’t because we thought it was great.

Internet marketer Matt Barak pushed out a press release via PRWeb about him scoring 99.9% on TwitterGrader. Only problem is that one’s TwitterGrader scores are, rather fluid and don’t really mean you’re in the “Twitter elite”, but Matt put up the press release regardless:

What’s better than soaring to the top of a popular social networking site? How about skyrocketing to the summit of two of them? That’s the envious position The Powerful Promoter, Matt Bacak, found himself in last month when he entered the Twitter elite. Proving just how powerful his Internet marketing promotional strategies are, Bacak not only became a top three Atlanta Twitterer, but he currently outranks 99.9% of all members of the site. Internet marketers who would like to follow The Powerful Promoter’s tweets and improve their own promotional efforts can do so online at http://twitter.com/mattbacak.

[From The Powerful Promoter Promotes Himself Straight to the Top of Twitter - Matt Bacak Achieves Another Social Networking Milestone]

So here is his Twitter grade: Matt Bacak and yes he is marked as in the “Twitter elite for Atlanta, GA“, see there are lots of folks there too, not to mention I also have a 99.9% grade and am in the Twitter elite for Vancouver, BC so what’s the deal here?

Did Matt blow it tooting his own horn or not?

Sorta.

The chatter and sentiment on Digg is less than charitable, but really we’re all edge cases in this regard. We understand that what you get from TwitterGrader is more like a fun little thing not to be taken seriously. We’re all thinking this guy is an idiot. None of us have heard of him (I’ve @ replied to him and haven’t gotten a ping back, so I guess he’s not monitoring-bad call there) and we shaking our heads.

However think about his potential clients, folks who aren’t into social media, etc, they’ll go, oooh aaaahhh. Not to mention we’re all talking about it, like they say there’s no such thing as bad PR.

I think this is another case of the divide between the savvy and the tactically smart (or lucky). We know that the release is BS. That one’s rise to the pantheon of twitter, if there is such a place, isn’t something that gets handed down from on high. The rest of the world doesn’t though. I’m simultaneously grateful, bewildered, and cognizant of the fact that I have about 2650 Twitter followers. I’m flattered that people follow me, I don’t think I say very many profound things, but I know that if I send something out it has a broad audience.

And I as much as I catch myself lacking humility about the number of followers I have, I figure I’m still a small fish. Lots of people have more followers. Lots of people with fewer followers have a lot more interesting things to say than I.

So Matt put out a press release that potential clients will eat up, he looks like an internet marketing god to them while the echo chamber laughs (and maybe out of a small about of jealousy). I’m wondering if Matt might just be laughing all the way to the bank.

Tagged as: Social Media, twitter, twittergrader, Web 2.0