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.

Criticising Social Media ?

Criticizing social media?

Are you doing so for any of the following reasons:

• Because you think this is a buzzword which will eventually die-down
• Because your mind tells tells you that there’s nothing to social media beyond twitter, blogs and Facebook
• Because every second person you have seen on twitter claims to be a social media evangelist or a catalyst
• Because you do not seem to understand the differences and similarities between digital media and social media

Image by Laughing Squid via Flickr

• Because you are fed up of blog-posts talking about socialmedia ROI & budgets and don’t understand what is the ROI
• Because you see brands jumping on social media bandwagon and you fail to understand what they’re gaining out of it
• Because you witness endless talks about conversations, communities, content
• Because you are trying to understand the meaning of terms of ‘social’ and ‘media’ and combined together
• Because you discuss your problems with consultants and every time you talk to them there’s more confusion than ever before

Rather not do it as it is more a perception issue than anything else !!  Understand  Social Media as a Philosophy and its application as a Culture.

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: