Preventing Social Media Spam

Image by Josh Russell via Flickr

Sometimes it feels really sorry to see the tactics of a select group of folks in the name of using Social media as a Conversation Medium ! By-and-large this is applicable to Twitter baring the first couple of points.

The Problem

1. Email spam: They  continue to send you bulk promotional emails, although you never opted-in for their newsletter. On the name of customization, they start the email with your name prefix and believe they are not spamming your email box.  To your surprise, you are not allowed to copy & reproduce their email although they didn’t take your permission at the first place.
2. Blog Spameeters: They start a one-dimensional blog to blatantly promote the poor client’s new product offerings.
3. RTing & RTing: They create multiple accounts on twitter, send tweet from one id and then re-tweet from others. End-result = The user ends up thinking that there is a great conversation going on.
4. Follow mania: They follow all the celebrities and all those who have more than 1000 followers in a hope to attract some eyeballs.
5. Twomit dosage: While it is the lifeline of many, they continue to talk about the color of their underwear on twitter. Eating food, walking dog, brushing their teeth. It’s a moral obligation.They all know twitter has a threshold when it comes to maximum requests at an instance and maximum no. of tweets. However, they never refrain to curse twitter every time it suffers from an outage.

Enterprise 2.0 Conversations

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Over the course of December, I have been closely following Jacob Morgan‘s blog-posts on Social Media, emerging Enterprise 2.0 trends and the variety of issues companies face during adoption. He has been having a series of exciting conversations with industry veteran Wendy Troupe and some of the points discussed are absolutely amazing !

While I would highly recommend all the ‘5’ posts, here are some interesting pieces that I really like:

1. “If there is no “R”, then the “I” becomes a “C” and that cost is always going to be too high.”  I think ROI should always be a consideration but I don’t think it should be the only consideration. [In a presentation by Aaron Julius Kim about ROI].

Social Media Conversation series (Talk with Anna Farmery)

Background: This is the second blog-post in a series of conversations with Social Media change agents, Social media thought-leaders, experts and mavens to answer some of the most important questions surrounding the subjects of Social media and Web2.0 ! The emphasis of this discussion series is to address ’socialmedia’ at a ground level and talk about the real world issues that are being faced by us on both sides of the road: i.e. as actual users and as consultants/agencies in this space.

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After the engaging conversation with Dennis D. McDonald, Ph.D, I am proud to have with me, widely read and heard social media and branding trainer, Anna Farmery.

At a personal level, I am a great fan of Anna’s  The Engaging Brand podcast series  which has been nominated for two years as the Best Business podcast. In addition, she consistently speaks and delivers workshops on branding, motivation and social media. You can read Anna’s blog or listen to her free weekly audio show at http://www.theengagingbrand.com

Social Media Jobs in India

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Ever since the Web2.0 wave has caught up in India there has been a tremendous shift ! Shift in our thinking, our perception and the way we have looked towards internet & its capabilities. If you talk about an average business owner, he is looking very carefully at the dynamics of Web2.0 [conversations, community, culture, collaboration]. Irrespective of the domain he is trying to tap on its potential an learn from this medium.

However he knows that before making a leap and jumping into the pool, his brand needs an expert advice for creating a successful strategy.

For building a strategy you need helping hands, you need the ‘services’ of experts who can understand your needs to the core and guide you. This is where different schools of thought come-in.

The conservatives
As a business owner, I believe that I have an understanding of the Web 2.0 platform, I know what I need to do and where I need to go.I don’t think we need a specialist position or assistance from an agency/consultant for this.

The Street-smarts
I don’t think we have the in-house capabilities to drive our entire web2.0-strategy for us. I think it is best if we discuss our problems with an expert media agencies. The only compromise is in this case

The Futurists
I understand that I need to engage in healthy conversations for my brand and I think we need to hire chaps who can help us in doing just this. I might go in for one guy or a team of individuals depending on what my goals are. I don’t think agency will best serve our case as their perception will always be external. On the flip-side, if we have people are deeply engaged in our daily organizational activities they will certainly execute the plans in a much better way.

So which roles are these and what do these guys need to do? Lets have a look at some real job-descriptions from some Indian companies:

Social-media specialist [via Jobs India]

What does he do?

As a Social Media Specialist, you will be responsible for marketing and socialization of our client’s online content. Familiarity with the internet, social media sites, search engines, discussion boards, blogs, video sharing sites and pod casting is an asset but a willingness to learn is essential. You must possess excellent written and verbal communication skills in order to write and edit high quality content. A background in interactive marketing or public relations is considered a plus. The ability to find solutions in order to generate measurable results for clients is necessary as well as the generation of reports on those efforts.

Social-media marketing/campaign strategist [via Naukri.com]

– Conceptualize the innovative social media solutions to increase traffic to the web sites / portals
– Define strategy to improve end user involvement through Social Networks
– Define the avenues of revenue generation through increased and focused traffic
– Provide valuable insight and strategy for social media campaigns

Community Manager

I think this is one role that is evolving quite well. In bits-nd-pieces you will see some roles in the organization that are performing some actions from this role. Earlier this year, I had talked about the job-description and the need for Community manager at length.

Job-description [via a web portal]

• Growing membership and site traffic
• Designing and executing marketing initiatives
• Working with members to make them successful
• Finding members to contribute content to the communities
• Contributing product ideas

Not to forget the traditional roles of SEO analysts and Online marketers.

What is your take on this? Please do share other roles that I did miss? In the Indian context do you think we’ll see more such roles in the future?

Suggested reading:

Six types of social media agencies in India

Indian startups need more community managers

Enterprise adoption of Web2.0 technologies

McKinsey has published a fantastic report on ‘Six ways to make Web2.0 work’.

Some of the points discussed in the report are very valid and a great learning resource for all organizations which are struggling to drive their ‘Web 2.0‘ initiatives. It is a must-read for the so called decision makers and tier – 1 executives in SMEs. As Steve Clayton correctly points out the report doesn’t mention ‘Twitter‘ until the end where McKinsey’s twitter id is shared for extension of conversation. But that seems to be the only aspect which has not been addressed.

Moving on, here is a small attempt to present my understanding of some of the points captured in the post. The focus is to compare the difference between traditional IT tools and Web 2.0 technologies:

Recruiting Lessons from Google

How does Google manage to be different everytime 🙂 Their recruitment advertisement in today’s Times of India Ascent is another example that !

The world’s no.1 search-engine company has positioned itself as a startup in this job-advertisement.

The catch line says ‘Start-up company with manpower, funding an ideas seeks entrepreneur‘.

A thing or a two to learn for the modern-companies:

Comfort feel for your potential employees
Learn how to position yourself even if you aren’t a startup anymore. Provide a start-up comfort factor to your potential recruits. Talk about the open-culture, encouragement for entrepreneurship and things like that.

Startup tag works well
Jumping on the big company bandwagon is easy. Staying on with your current start-up tag is tough.

They say it works both ways. A company’s screening process includes relevant experience, educational background and similar parameters. OTOH, a candidate screens the right companies for his job. ‘Culture’ is a vital ingredient of his company-screening process.