Spammy @s
An surprisingly effective click generating tactic using Twitter @replies works like this: find someone tweeting about a subject word, reply "if you like X then <link>," and you do it a few thousand or tens of thousands of times for as long as your account stays active. What about when your account is blocked for spamming? Just create another account. It's virtually impossible to block without tactical attention. Since it's been going on so long, it's doubtful Twitter is going to address it any time soon. This is likely one of the problems they intended to remedy with the @reply policy change that was so unpopular.
But, how effective is spam really?
One Twitter spammer generated 31K+ clicks with this method. Since I haven't spoken to the marketer yet, I've no real way of knowing how long this process has been going or how many people they have bugged to get this sort of response. But, the bit.ly numbers do reveal an awful lot of interesting data regarding this particular marketer.
On this page you can see the basic message tactic. It goes basically like this:
"Interested by widgets? Look at this new kind of widgets alerting you on your desktop <link> Cool a?"
The English Second Language style is interesting. I would assume this reveals the location of the marketer more than a technique. But, it would be interesting to test with both to see if this is actually part of the method.
The marketer's bit.ly account home reveals that this single bit.ly account has been used on many similar projects. Though myboo.com is the latest marketing client/project, this bit.ly account has been used to promote fanchecker.com, facebook widgets yourhoodsf as well as Elle's Facebook fan page. Interestingly, bit.ly flagged much of this content spam and blocked the links, but did not cancel the spammer's account.
Overall this appears to be an effective, though distasteful, marketing strategy.