An email from @JayOatway to @maratom posted on Twitpic recently has created quite a stir amongst the Kong Kong Twitter community. It has encapsulated the escalating tension between Hong Kong’s growing social media scene and regular Twitter users, the kind with little or no interest in gaining influence, improving follower ratios or taking a series of HK$ 1280 courses on how to manipulate, exploit and otherwise ruin what once was a fun and friendly way to keep in touch.

Who is Jay Oatway you ask? Jay is Hong Kong’s self professed “Top Twitter Star” with + 86.000 followers. When he is not defining the new era of digital journalism, he enjoys posing for cool profile pictures, being a “trend-hunter” (ey, the word “journalist” is so web 1.0) and quoting Guy Kawasaki. Reminds you of someone?

We at The Dark Side can overlook the blatant whoring in Jay’s email, after all, one of the most important requirements of being a social media douchebag guru is shameless, relentless self promotion, and at that we excel. What we don’t understand however is how he can berate and belittle a fellow Hong Kong Twitterer for using a “simplistic and highly personal approach” when managing his personal Twitter account, while in the same week discussing “engaging” and “listening to what people are saying” at his next tweetcamp event. For shame! Which is it Jay, engaging and listening to your users… or auto-follow software and an itchy forward-finger on mashable.com? Us simplistic personal users of Twitter would like to know…

If our favourite turbo-cougar, an attendee of one of Jay’s courses, is anything to go by they do at least cover the all-important “tw-” prefix… After all, nothing makes you look more twottally twauthentic than rendering yourself completely unintelligible by pretending you have a bizarre speech impediment. For a hard-hitting and incisively accurate account of the social media scam industry, check out this.

Ps. Jay, if you are reading this, the publicity and traffic are on the house… feel free to retweet us though, because unlike some other Hong Kong websites, we admit that we could use a little extra traffic.