So, last week, there was a disturbance in the Twitter-Force.
Tech-Crunch was reporting that the service was cracking down on Spam accounts, and people were losing followers. The blogosphere and Twittersphere lit up and it was a huge topic for the latter part of last week.
Now, to be fair the only thing they were reacting to was this (I think) rather cryptic note on the Twitter blog that read:
“For some time, the follower and following counts we display have been incorrect for some folks. We’re soon to push a change that will address this issue. This means that the count you see in your sidebar should match what you see on your follower and following pages.
…..In particular, those with large followings may see significant changes as we correct for spam accounts and data inconsistencies. No legitimate followings should be affected—we’re just cleaning up artifacts in the system.”
So, only a passing mention of Spam accounts – and really more of a focus on the fact that they seemed to be having some database issues.
And, in fact, some users really saw themselves brought completely back to square one – such as this user who saw their account completely wiped out. That’s a topic for a whole other discussion of how much corporate marketing investment do you *really* want to put into Twitter?
But anyway, so this evening, I saw this blog post on ClickZ which I thought was kinda goofy because it sought to really define what “spam” was on Twitter – and it got me to thinking…
Just what is spam on Twitter?
In the blog post, ClickZ conducted an interview with Omar Zaibak, author of the Blue Falcon Marketing blog (interesting blog – and they have their own ideas for eliminating Twitter spam). - he defined it as “any tweet that is highly irrelevant and useless to the user it is being sent to“.
Um, yeah, I’m gonna go ahead and refrain from the obvious joke there…
But then he continues and calibrates his statement with “keep in mind what one user may consider spam, another may find quite useful“.
So then I ask again… What is spam on Twitter?
By default, Twitter is opt-in – you have to proactively (all of those wacky punny TweetAdderFollowerMoreUsersFriendsFollowYou.com sites notwithstanding) follow people – and you can actively block anyone you don’t want to follow any longer.
The ClickZ blog post then goes on to suggest ways that you can avoid being “tagged” as a spammer on Twitter. They suggest that you “avoid repetition” because tweeting the same message might be considered spammy. Tell that to @guykawasaki who has publicly said that he repeats Tweets because he doesn’t assume followers are reading him 24X7.
I’ve also seen suggestions that you should “avoid too many promotional messages”. But let’s be honest – what a promotional message is and isn’t is a very fine and blurry line. Just ask MoonFruit about their experience in providing what they thought was a valuable giveaway – and Twitter found – well objectionable in some way.
So, we come back to the question… What is Spam on Twitter?
I don’t have an answer for this – and I don’t for one minute want to suggest that Twitter shouldn’t actually go to the effort of removing the accounts that are clearly set up and managed by bots or that are ruining the experience for all by gaming the system. I just want to suggest that we should be careful that we don’t apply our traditional models to what is a new content model. Twitter is not email. We choose who we follow – and we can even block those that follow us. The last thing we need is an effort around “Twitter Deliverability” and “Twitter Spam Blockers”.
Let’s resist the urge for technology to solve a problem that good sense can alleviate.
