The Tweetvine is abuzz today with the story of Michael Werch and his experience of ‘twitter-squatting’. Michael took on the persona of Heinz, and tweeted as them for a short while, to see how many followers he could build up, and what the consequences could be.
As it happens, he only managed to build up 300 or so followers (rising now!) and a couple of weeks before Heinz jumped on him and complained to Twitter, who changed his profile to make it clear that he wasn’t an official representative.
The interesting part, to me, is this quote:
I’m always telling clients to track their marketing, and obviously it’s easy to do that online with the help of google Analytics or a real time webstats tool such as 
For a long time I used Google Analytics to provide webstats for me and for my clients – and it worked. Great stats, pretty graphs, nice figures – everything I needed.The problem I had was that I couldn’t get real time stats – I had to wait until the next day, by which time in some cases it was too late to react to surges in traffic.
