Social Media is No Place for Robot Behavior

Dig it Chris. Great post.

Great post. Your thoughts on it are very similar to mine. I really like Twitter, but not necessarily all of the twits that misuse it. Unfortunately I think it is just a matter of time before the spam artists kill all that is good about the service. But for now I get more benefit than pain out of it. You know the old saying, all good things must come to an end. I just hope its later rather than sooner. Have a great 2009.
~jon

Oh, Chris, I do so enjoy the way you write!

A-f*cking-men.

Get Real! Have Some Fun. Be Real and Have Some Good Conversations for NO alterior motive but just to maybe help someone or brighten their day

Makes Good Sense to me!

I’ve got an auto message on my twitter follow. I think I’ll stop it now :)
I wanna be seen as a real person not just as someone who wants your click.

Chris:

For me Twitter is all about learning…asking questions…finding people who have viewpoints, activities, businesses, etc. that interest me…professionally or personally. Before I follow someone, I look at their twitter profile, some of the people in their stream, their website, and sometimes look for these folks on other social media platforms. And of course that means I don’t have a huge, huge following yet, and it takes time–an investment of MY human capital–to look at info on these followers. But hey, it’s an investment in cultivating relationships. If I follow someone, I will respond with a “Thanks for the follow” message, but will also try to include a conversation starter in the DM.

If I eventually meet people who I wind up doing business with, I want it to be due to the relationship that we’ve developed, rather than by shoving a “Hi! Here’s my new and improved spammy e-book” message down their throat.

Relationships that are worth keeping require reciprocal cultivation and interest. To get to that point, we have to listen, find those people who interest us, and try to establish communication so more listening and learning can happen.

While spammy stuff will continue to proliferate on Twitter and other social media platforms, let’s hope that enough folks continue to understand that social media is for generating conversation, learning, and hopefully strong relationships.

I totally agree. I am at the point where I don’t open any links from people that send me automated messages. If you want me to check out a link send it in a tweet so everyone can check it out.

The only automated Tweet that I do is for my blog. When I publish a new blog a new tweet is sent out but just asks people to check it out.

Thanks for the great blog.
@jayphilips

Thank you for saying it, Chris. Let’s hope people listen. The number of times I was woken up in the middle of the night by a ‘Thanks for following’ post to my phone, before shutting off that feature…

Your point about Twitter being who you follow was RIGHT ON!

Couldn’t put my finger on what was bugging me about some of my fellow twitters before I read this… on-line socializing and tools like twitter only work when the majority of people try to provide instead of request.

Twitterers with single-minded, poorly-concealed marketing agendas should be strapped down and forced to watch 3 am infomercials.

Bravo!

Excellent post for all Twitterers. Speaking of talking robots, did you hear that the Department of Defense hopes to build computer programs to talk to toddlers who are writing to their parents who are soldiers serving oversees? Check out the Bob Ostertag post on this topic: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ostertag/dod-seeks-software-to-tri_b_159132.html

I have read with interest not only what you had to say, but also all the commenters. Like anything, any kind of an autoresponder (robot) has its uses, but in a social community – not a chance! Personally I find it a little insulting as the point to being social on a social community is to build a relationship with a real person not necessarily to build a list of names to market to.
Your viewpoint has come at the perfect time for so many.

Best Regards,

Amen brother! I am new to Twitter, but I would never do the robot thing! It is sort of like the “intrusion marketing” on TV or radio where they repeat the toll free number three or four times. I would never buy those products either on principle alone!!

Thanks for Tweeting about this post. I run the Twitter feed at my job (and have for a year), and now that suddenly the marketers have discovered this newfangled technology (sigh), they want to take it away from me and operate it themselves. You’ve just written exactly what will happen if I part with my password. Which is why, I won’t! :)

Dawn, you make us marketers sound like the enemy. *sigh* We’re not, at least not some of us. Some of us really would like to find a way to work together and recognize that there’s more than just one voice in the company. On that note, from my perspective it’s important that the marketing and communications people be on top of this stuff. Anything that is being said about the company by any employees should be consistent with the company’s messaging and overall direction. I’ve seen too often where an employee thought they were helping and had the best of intentions, but in reality they hurt more than they helped (e.g. the employee that was twittering for Exxon Mobil. She set up an account on behalf of the company, but some of her information was inaccurate. A company can get in a lot of trouble if they’re putting out inconsistent information).

Robots do not make laws
they follow them’
humans make laws
but break them

Chris, you were the guy that introduced me to the first social network to really steal my heart: Friendfeed.

And I thank you for that, from the bottom of my heart. I truly do. I really love it.

But now there is a situation with my not spending all that much time on twitter and people still continuing to want to follow me there…and the daily number of new followers is increasing, despite the fact that it says on my twitter profile that I don’t use twitter all that much..

Is it wrong for me to send these people an automatic DM telling them I don’t pay attention to twitter that much and if they want to communicate with me they are better off following me on friendfeed instead (with link to my profile there)?

I want them to unfollow me on twitter, and if they use friendfeed, follow me there. Is that so wrong?

If you called me on the phone and got my answering machine or voicemail, and the outgoing message gave you a number or address of where I was, enabling you to communicate with me directly, which is why you called me in the first place, would you get pissed at me for using automation tools to tell you this?

I am not sending out a link to any of my websites, nor am I trying to sell my followers a useless book (or some other crap), nor am I autoposting “new blog post” notices. The links to posts on my blog are quite rare and almost all were posted manually by me, usually as part of conversations, or because I wanted to ask my followers for feedback on something that would take much more than 140 chars.

My feelings about twitter have not changed. I find that having a conversation there is very awkward, but I don’t want to lose my followers. Quite a few are really wonderful people. I try to check in around once a day on Twitter, to check my DM’s and @replies just to make sure that no valid communications go by unacknowledged. At the same time, I am still feeding the followers that choose to stay with twitter, all the goodies from all over the internet that has my attention, and I feel the amount and quality of good links shared has even increased, since I started automating my twitter posts by connecting it to my Friendfeed account. (this might even be contributing to the increasing number of new followers).

I don’t want to abandon my twitter followers, so my compromise is based mostly in automation. How is this wrong? If they don’t like it, they can unfollow me any time they want. Most don’t, so I guess they don’t mind.

Now if you want to hold that against me, that’s your prerogative. But before you do, I want to mention that you are more or less doing the same thing on friendfeed, and I am following you there, and not holding it against you.

I agree with you completely. But, how about auto-follow. Isn’t that just more Twitter robots?