Something is cooking at Twitter but is that smell Korean tacos or spam accounts? NPR reported the other week that the “hottest place to eat in Los Angeles right now serves food out of a truck and owes a large part of its success to Twitter” and that Kogi had over 8,000 followers on Twitter” but NPR may have been duped on that number?

I didn’t actually catch this story until I read it at Mike Blumenthal’s blog the other day and then went back to listen to it here, that said I do know that NPR is all a twitter with twitter and I can imagine they ate this story up, without thinking twice about it.

Study social media sites long enough and you’ll see a pattern that comes up over and over again.  Those looking to shortcut the process of rising to the top will attempt to do two things.  First they’ll try and make themselves look more popular than they are.  In general this is done by creating fake accounts.  On Digg, for example fake accounts are created and then these are used to  vote up stories.  Annalee Newitz wrote about buying diggs in Wired back in 2007.

In order to create a story newsworthy enough to get national media attention someone on Twitter would need a lot of followers.  At the time of the story kogibbq was reported to have over 8000 followers, last time I checked they were over 13,000.   Are all of these accounts legitimate?  Maybe, but maybe not.  I decided to sift through some of their “followers’ and found a lot of instances of accounts where kogibbq was the only account being followed and in many of those cases, like this one:

and this one

and this one

the followers have never uttered a tweet nor do they have any followers themselves.   I certainly don’t have the resources to sift through the thousands of so called followers and see how many more there are like this, nor is that really my point.

Here’s the thing.  Right now every one is singing the praise of Twitter and a lot of it is deserved, it’s pretty cool, and if you’d like to follow me there please do,   but if you’re a small local business wondering if you can leverage Twitter into thousands of new customers I urge you to go slowly.   Try and get a feeling for how many people in your market might be interested in your service or product are on twitter, try not to listen to the hype and remember that while lots of people would like to sell you their $127.99 course on how to maximize profits from Twitter the territory here is really new and untested.  The success many of those folks wanting to sell you a course for $127.99 have had is in all the people they’ve successfuly sold the course to over Twitter by hyping it as the “must do” marketing technique of the year.

All that said, if you’re a local business and your Tweets have helped you grow your business please share it in the comments.  I would love to hear from you because it’s not that I think Twitter will never be useful to the local business person it’s just yet to be proven.