Comments on: When Is It Spam?

By: Neicole

Neicole — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:47:36 +0000

Thanks, Heidi. I think you’re right that the ratio is a critical factor. And relevancy is important, of course.

Thanks for commenting!

By: Heidi Cool

Heidi Cool — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 17:04:33 +0000

I think Steve is right that (to some degree) SPAM is in the eye of the beholder. The make money fast pitches are clearly spam. The new trend in which a user makes the same pitch one at a time to others but using the @ to direct it to a user is clearly spam. But promoting something that will be of value to a certain audience, and identifying it by a proper hashtag seems legitimate to me.

We’re all allowed to do a certain amount of promotion, but the rule of thumb for social media has traditionally been that promotional Tweets should make up a smaller fraction of your content than the rest of your Tweets. So whether you Tweet the same thing twice or 4 times may not be as relevant as how many other Tweets come between those. If you promote X 4 times in one day (and X is of real interest to some people) but also made 40 non-promotional Tweets then a person viewing your stream probably won’t consider you to be a spammer.

If I see the same message from you a few times in a day, and that’s all I see, I may find it annoyingly repetitive. But if I also see lots of other interesting things, then I’ll cut you more slack. (And given the volume of Tweets I may be less likely to notice that you’ve been repeating.) So overall I think much of this has to do with context.

By: Neicole

Neicole — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:20:26 +0000

I LOVE your avatar!!!

I agree re: raising more questions. Maybe my survey will help answer some of them. Relevancy (a product I don’t want or do want) is clearly important.

By: Matches Malone

Matches Malone — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:51:10 +0000

Well, Twam, or Twitter Spam, would be defined as an unsolicited tweet in your stream for a product that you don’t want or need. However, ultimately, aren’t all tweets unsolicited? Your post raises more questions than it answers, ultimately. Might have to blog about that

By: Shane

Shane — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 01:21:38 +0000

I just took your poll but I think I would have changed a few things. I am a person who really thinks the only time it is spam is if there is nothing relevant in the information to say a blog or discussion. On Twitter, who cares? People are too touchy and for the love of Chrysler, who can figure out what makes EVERYONE happy? People need to chill the heck out and get over themselves. People are just trying to make a living in this absolutely horrible economy!

By: Neicole

Neicole — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 20:22:03 +0000

Great points! Thanks! Opt in or opt out ability is key, for sure. And I think relevancy is very important. I’m really interested to see the results of my survey, because I hypothesize it really does make a difference whether you view yourself as having a relationship with this person and/or whether you think the “spam” might actually be valuable to you or someone else. The latter, or the “junk” as you called it, Steve, really varies from person to person and time to time. One man’s spam is another man’s steak!

By: Keith O Hudson

Keith O Hudson — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:54:20 +0000

P.S. I think many people see spam as “unwanted” messages. These may be junk messages, but when I have the ability to simply turn off all messages from a particular source, I don’t think they can properly be called spam if I gave my consent to receive them.

By: Keith O Hudson

Keith O Hudson — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:52:23 +0000

Maybe my view is slanted because I have a keen interest in learning how to market online using free services and tools, but in a social networking situation where I can choose whether to receive or not receive messages from others, there is no such thing as spam. Spam is sending unsolicited messages without the recipient’s permission. On Twitter, only @ messages can even fall into that definition. If Twitter really wanted to get rid of spam, they could disable the sending of @ messages.

By: Twitter is set to kill its market by eliminating the ability to use recurring tweets

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 18:01:30 +0000

[...] Bloggers, businesses, and anyone who actually wants to have a chance of being heard has to tweet the same message more than once. (Especially those who don’t have many thousands of followers.) If they don’t, the chances are miniscule of their tweet being seen by anyone, let alone large numbers of people. (See my last blog post, When is it spam?) [...]

By: INFO4HER - MyCity4Her.com’s BLOG » Blog Archive » Thought provoking article on when is it spam? By Nicole Crepeau

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:13:09 +0000

[...] To read more click here. [...]