Had some interesting discussions here and on Twitter back in April about the spam situation on Twitter, including some spirited assertions from some quarters that spam was impossible on Twitter. The arguments for this point of view, based on semantic technicalities, are several. First, your updates are public, so by merely following you, someone is not spamming you. Second, you can turn off Twitter notification emails, so these are not spam either.

I disagreed with this at the time, and still do, and so apparently does Twitter. The company published a post Monday about its recognition of a spam problem and its commitment to deal with it:

“We are actively engaged in working to defeat the variety of spam that has made its way to Twitter. The main motivation for spammy behavior on Twitter seems to be the usual: driving web traffic to another site. Some account owners will serially create many accounts and then post thousands of links. Others have only one account but still go crazy posting links—usually to the same web site and often in a way that attempts to trick people into clicking.

Posting links to Twitter is great and we encourage people to do so. However, spammers are posting links on a whole different scale and they’re doing something else we call Aggressive Following. This behavior entails following thousands of other accounts in the hope of reciprocation and it really peeves Twitter users because many of us are sensitive to our Follower count—we don’t want email notifications triggered by spammers.”

Last night, which I’ve dubbed The Night of 1 Million Lost Followers, (it’s probably more across all users), Twitter did extensive cleanup on its database in order they say to “remove spammers from the system (which we’ve been doing a lot lately).” As a result, most users are reporting decreased numbers of followers and people they are following.

Tags: twitter, spam, followers, following, clean-up

(Artifact from the future)
July 22, 2092 — Foster City Clean-Up Zone — Silicon Desert — Work was halted earlier this week on remediation of the Foster City Zone when workers discovered a cache of important artifacts from the early Web 2.0 era. Historical preservationists quickly stepped in, hoping to protect the site for its heritage and archaeological importance.

Among the items found was this primitive, laser-printed diary providing a never-before-seen glimpse of the day-to-day life of a hardy social media pioneer.

The author, @socialmediagenius, was apparently a struggling public relations professional lured to the region by tales of vast wealth.

Typical of the heart wrenching and often inspiring entries are:

• September 14, 2007. Preparing for long winter ahead. Laying in supplies of Cheetos, Coke and frozen pizzas.
• February 9, 2008. must. get. coffee.
• February 11, 2008. Cat crawling across keyboard. So cute!*
• March 27, 2008. Facebook IM sucks.
• May 6, 2008. I just don’t get the appeal of Plurk.
• June 10, 2008. I pray each day the good Lord to protect us from the fail whale.
• July 14, 2008. We face more trials and tribulations. Brightkite not updating to Twitter timeline. Not sure I can go on.
• July 21, 2008. Supplies running low. Disheartened to find local Starbucks slated for closing. Womenfolk holding up well, doing more than their fair share. Mapping bug fixed. Now it would appear my file-generation code is borked.

We are fortunate to live today in an era where this kind of adversity threatens our very survival.

* No further mentions of the cat are made in the diary. It is assumed that the author killed the cat and ate it not long after this entry.

If you’re involved with Social Media Newsrooms, Social Media News Releases or any similar Web 2.0-based news distribution method, I’d love to feature your company, service or site in my presentation August 14, from 2:30 p.m.-3:30 p.m. at Ragan Communications’ “Corporate Communications and the Social Media Revolution,” to be held at eBay’s headquarters in San Jose, California. The new deadline for submission of materials is Friday, July 24, 2008! I will give away two stylish Socialized t-shirts to two randomly selected entries.

My session is titled The Social Media Newsroom: News Now. Everywhere. I want to feature the latest and greatest in newsroom deployments at companies of all sizes and types. If you’d like to be included in the presentation, please email me as soon as possible a one- to two-page brief on each newsroom you’d like me to include, along with your contact information. If you have slides that might be useful, you can email those too. I am compiling a resource list to give to attendees, so if your company designs, deploys and manages social media newsrooms, please give me your info for inclusion in that list.

I’ve created a template for submitting a newsroom for inclusion. Download it here, and modify freely. Send materials to joel@socializedpr.com

Thank you!

Ragan Communications is offering a $200 conference discount for Socialized blog readers who register for the August conference. Enter the code SPK8 when you register.

I hope to see you there.

Tags: ragan, social media revolution, ebay, san jose, social media newsrooms, joel postman

Last night I screwed around online for two hours wondering what to write about in my next blog post. Have you ever seen a PowerPoint presentation (like this one) with that hack quote “everything that can be invented has been invented”?* It seems the same is true about blogging. Everything that can be written about in a blog has been written about. Check the comments on any blog or Twitter and you’ll see many repetitions on the theme “there’s nothing new here.”

Now comes “news” from Valleywag that most of us shouldn’t bother writing blogs. Valleywag’s piece assumes that blogs are solely intended to be profitable media entities, an imperative that has ruined thousands of blogs and contributed to both a confrontational style of writing, and an agenda biased toward site traffic and advertising dollars. But I understand the world has changed, and for many, pro bono blogging is no longer relevant.

The piece also argues that changes in social media habits have made blogs less effective at driving traffic than search engines, aggregators and microblogging environments, observing, based on analysis by James Joyner, “the geeks who read blogs all day in 2003 are now following Twitter and other speedier media.”

I agree with this, but note the all-important inclusion of the word “geek.” These observations apply to the geeks, the early adopters, the bubble insiders. That’s the essence of the flaw in the notion that blogs need only cover something “new.” Twitter, for example, is one of the hottest topics in social media right now. How many thousands of educational posts are there on how to use Twitter? Twitter has an estimated 1.6 million users. Nielsen estimates (PDF) there are over 200 million Americans with Internet access. Facebook has over 80 million users. So if Twitter is to become mainstream, statistically speaking, the majority of its eventual user base are not yet online do not know how to use it, and haven’t read a word about it.

Should we ignore them because the topic is no longer fresh to 5000 social media experts? I think there is room for tens of thousands of blogs on similar topics. Why are people calling for a thinning of the herd when social media was supposed to be about letting everyone in the heard have a say?

* Turns out like most really clever quotes, this one is apocryphal. It’s a misinterpretation of a statement made by Patent Office Commissioner Henry Ellsworth in an 1843 report to Congress, in which he states, “The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.”

Chris Lynn of SHIFT Communications quoted me extensively in a piece on Media Bullseye on developing corporate social media policies. Here are three tips I offered:

• Develop a comprehensive policy that extends to all employees and all use of social media and social networks whenever there is potential for employees to be seen as company representatives.

• Engage with all appropriate departments within the company, such as legal, finance and marketing, when developing the policy, but do not allow their influence to result in an overly restrictive policy.

• Be emphatic about the need for social media users to behave ethically, legally, and in the best interests of the company, its customers, employees, shareholders, and business partners.

You can read the rest of the piece, Searching for Balance: Companies Struggle to Develop Social Media Policies, here.

Tags: corporate, social, media, policy, policies