By now, half the world has discovered how you can add your brand or company to any social networking site, act like you’re actually someone interesting enough to befriend, and then send off nothing else but shitty messages to the idiots who added you back.
Twitter, the past couple days, has been particularly bad. Because, you see, I’d always hoped this wouldn’t happen to my favourite service ever. I simply do not want to know about health advice, life coaching or hypnotherapy thanks.
And no, it’s not because your profile goes something like
web developer and general web 2.0 enthusiast writes about all things tech and geeky
that you actually have anything to say that I need or want to know.
Bar these creepy tweeps, however, I do still follow back anyone who adds me and more. So Scoble, at least, can be happy about that.
***
Sometimes however, social spam (we need to coin a new phrase for these social networking ads — sads?) does come as a nice and refreshing surprise.
Take this shout I got on Last.fm for instance:
I see you listen to The Postal Service, and our band The Long Division has been mentioned in the same vein as them. What do you think?
While this isn’t a personal message, nor sent out of goodwill and the urge to educate me musically, at least it doesn’t come across too pushy.
And I do love and listen to The Postal Service a lot, and this new band, The Long Division, is actually pretty nice. Some of the tracks available on LFM are perhaps too much imitation instead of flattery, but they grow on you. Do check them out.
So thanks, sympathetic semispammer, for letting me know.
***
But is there any lesson to be learnt here, then?
Maybe. As a brand, feel free to use the social networks to get your message across. Pick a few people to work with it at first, don’t alienate them but send them a limited number of messages, tweets or shouts, and make these relevant.
Then, if what you’re peddling is actually good, it’ll take off.
And now excuse me while I start deleting another batch of worthless friend requests from services I didn’t even know I had an account with.
Tags: social networks, The Postal Service, twitter
10 April 2008 at 12:52 pm
[...] NDNL : Good Spam Bad Spam (04/10/08) This entry was written by admin and posted on April 10, 2008 at 3:52 am and filed under Quote. [...]
10 April 2008 at 3:43 pm
So, on Twitter, you generally follow everyone who follows you? I have nowhere near the number of followers that you do, but even at my meager fifty-and-change, I wouldn’t be able to get anything else done with my day.
Maybe that’s more a testament to my lack of multitasking ability or my OCD-esque tendencies, but still.
I tend to only follow people if they have a rough one-to-one follow to following rate, or people who seem to have interesting tweets if I wander across them in the time line. Even then I’ve ended up following some strange people, and certainly more people than necessary who don’t tweet in English.
Which brings me to another problem: I can’t seem to break up with them, either.
Not even the spammers and robots.
10 April 2008 at 3:55 pm
Yeah, I also don’t tend to follow the hordes of Japanese who add me. Seems like there’s no point in that. But yeah, generally I follow everyone back, except for uninteresting spammers or bots. Cools spammers or bots I do add. You never know, right?
19 April 2008 at 12:44 am
What is it with that Twitter app?
I just don’t get it,
I still don’t get it.
Hey, I’m back. ;)
24 April 2008 at 9:30 am
I don’t get it either, Volkher. :-S
Nils, what’s that “zemifeed” icon you insert the end of your posts?
24 April 2008 at 3:21 pm
Hey Volkher, I’d been seeing you around but hadn’t had the chance to respond yet. You okay? Good to have you back though.
Well, Twitter, as a service, is just teh awesum. The apps you can get for it, AIR apps mostly, are fun to use. You should really try and get back into it.
Smaran, as far as Zemified is concerned, it’s a little semantic web addon for FF. As soon as I get hosted (soon I hope) I’m switching to the Calais plugin for WP though.