Social implies some personalization
I have been reading lately about some pet peeves of mine in this whole brave new Social Media world. During the summer I wrote a post called Know, Like and Trust a Twitter Trilogy. Since then some things have gone from strange to just plain silly.
Here are some observations from other people and some comments of my own:
Joel Comm, you may know him from his book, Twitter Power. (I’m honestly not sure if that is an affiliate link or not. Just in case the disclosure folks are looking.)
He wrote a post the other day on his blog called. “I purged my twitter account.” Read it, there are some great observations about the status of twitter and social media in general.
Seth Simonds recently did an article called “Why I canceled my Facebook account.”
Here’s my little experiment. With somewhere around 2,000 followers I just kind of dropped off the twitter map in August. No tweets, no manual anything. I did have an autofollow set up, so that I automatically followed anyone who followed me. My thought was that it wouldn’t be an issue because I wasn’t actively tweeting, so who would follow me? Wrong!
From August to Thanksgiving my twitter followers increased by about 800. That freaks me out! In that time I received 364 twitter Direct Messages. That’s pretty close to half and a good number of them were essentially, “Hey, buy my stuff.”
It got to the point that I didn’t even look at a DM before I deleted it! So, I ask you if half of the new followers auto DM with no value add, how long to do you expect that model to last?
Your turn, am I off base, or do some of these tools risk going from just plain useful to just plain crappy?
Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
