A few weeks ago I mutually befriended a fellow blogger on Twitter, thinking that we had a lot in common… but yesterday I woke up and discovered that I’d been wiped from his friends list. I felt slightly concerned that I’d somehow offended him, until I saw a blog post where he describes spamming 45,000 people for the sake of self-promotion using scripts. It’s worth reading, as an amazingly slick PR piece, where he paints baiting-and-switching people to build one-way followers as a virtuous self-discovery process… and many of his fans applaud him for it.

I’m not writing this to pick on any one person – but to call out and discourage the practice of passive-aggressive follow spam from gaining any kind of social legitimacy. I feel certian that if more people try to gain one-way followers with similar tactics, it will seriously impact the “quality of life” on Twitter.

Is there anything less cool than aggressively mass following people and swiftly mass booting ALL of them?

Why is this kind of behavior passive-aggressive? Because first he aggressively power networked with people… spending months madly mashing buttons and sweet talking anyone with a pulse… often adding hundreds or thousands of new followers per day. Then he passively used multiple scripts to drop everyone (because it would take too much effort to whack everyone by hand) – keeps the benefit of having most of his followers – and then invites those who notice what he did to “re-apply” for friendship.

To me, that’s far sketchier and more insidious than some “Make Money Online” guy building up mutual friends and dropping MLM links. The act of aggressively following and then mass unfollowing deserves a gold cup in the “Social Marketing Hall of Shame” (see picture above).

The Defining Traits of Social Media Spam

• Spam is self-promotional.

The sole motivation is to benefit the person who does it. Oftentimes it will promise false benefits to the recipient (“You Have Won $5 million!, “I’m a nice guy who really wants to connect on Twitter and be your friend!“) to entice people to take action that benefits the perpetrator – i.e., having more people follow them.

• Spam is done on a mass scale.

Spam gets its name from the Monty Python sketch where a restaurant bombards customers with thousands of ‘Spam’ dishes that they really don’t want. Passive-aggressive Twitter spammers hustle thousands of people they have no real interest in connecting with.

• Spam is automated.

Spammers use scripts to follow and unfollow people… to do the dirty work that would be too exhausting to do by hand. Scripts have legitimate uses, but it depends on the intention they are used with: Is it to make connecting and reciprocating easier, or to make baiting-and-switching people easier?

• Spam is calculating.

Spammers know that a lot of people will be irked and inconvenienced by their actions, but they calculate that the long-term personal gain will outweigh the bad karma and short-term fall out.

• Spam is deceptive.

Spammers often use deceptive headlines and double-speak to obscure what is really going on. They’ll try to take your money, clog your inbox and waste your time… and make it seem like it was a good idea or something you signed up for.

How Passive-Aggressive Following Ruins Twitter

• It’s a game.

Twitter spam is a game to see who can “get” the most attention followers while wanting to “give back” as little attention as humanly possible. It’s the three-card monte of microblogging.

• It wastes people’s time.

It clogs people’s timelines and inboxes with notifications from insincere spammers who aren’t really interested in connecting, causing real friends and fans to get buried in the noise.

• It disregards people’s feelings.

People don’t like being dropped. Fellow spammers don’t notice… but it leaves a very sour taste for those who legitimately care about the other people in their online network.

• It decreases community trust and goodwill.

After people get used enough, they stop trusting. Twitter becomes like a gaudy Flash banner, a Nigerian marriage proposal, the “hot chick” who friend requests you on MySpace… where people learn not to click on anything new.

• It creates crashes and down time.

Using scripts to game people puts an incredible strain on the technical network infrastructure. Next time you are at a conference and urgently need to send a message… and Twitter goes down, thank your neighborhood mass follow spammer for using many times their fair-share of the bandwidth to promote themselves.

Mass Following or Cleaning Isn’t Spam, But Doing Both IS

Some people feel that anyone who mass follows is a spammers – but I disagree. I think people like @zaibatsu are ’social butterfly’ personalities who are driven “go big” and interact with thousands of people. They are social marketers (‘people artists’) who understand people’s feelings and relationship karma… probably to well to seriously consider the harsh gesture of chopping all their fans in one sweep.

Nor do I think that all people who trim down their follow lists are spammers. It just depends on how they got their followers and their intentions. If someone is a top blogger or international conference speaker who earned a large chunk of their fans through legitimate buzz ( not from aggressive mass following & hustling) – and they want to cut back on the noise – it’s more forgivable, to me.

But I’m hard-pressed to think of a social media behavior that strikes me as more unsavory, or more un-rockstar-like than becoming an instant, fake “Twitter celebrity” by using scripts to add zillions of friends — and then using scripts to drop them all the second you think you can get away with it.

Spammers might think it makes them look “big” and more popular, but for me – it just shows that the Emperor Wears No Clothes. I can read between the lines see what a small-time, “triple digit” player they would be if it they hadn’t resorted to gaming people.



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