Is it too big of a faux pas to start this post off with DIDO? Thank you, thank you, thank you to Scott Stratten for writing, How to lose friends and tick off people on FaceBook. Basically, long story short, just because you have spent three months on Twitter, two months reading blogs, read one or two books by Chris Brogan or Seth Godin, and have a few epiphanies on how to spam your friends doesn't mean they are good ideas. Scott had quite a few good examples on how to application or event spam your friends, but I have a few more I'd like to include.
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- Don't try to make up things like "I love to smile or I love to sleep" and wait for 300k people to become a fan then start mailing them all about your dating website or new tooth brush. That is a lot of wasted money, you'd be better off paying to promote your tooth brush and just get real fans rather then trying to scam them.
- Don't ask for my business card at an event then add me to your newsletter full of more spam. If I wanted the company spam I would visit there site. It's why I have bacon settings in my email accounts. Read this post on managing bacon: Inbox at 1000, No Thanks to Bacon?
- If you keep spamming me on Twitter and don't do anything about it, don't get mad at me for unfollowing you. In fact you should probably privately go through and apologize to everyone. Maybe not, but you could and hand write them. That way you could learn the lesson, a lot like in school when they made you hand write I'm sorry 50-1000 times.
- Don't encourage people to follow you if you are irrelevant to them. Don't send me lots of tweets telling me how hot you think I am and that I would enjoy following you, let me be the judge of that. Don't set up a Twitter profile that says you are trying to get 300K followers for no reason. I don't care. Why do you want 300K followers? I think it's dumb. Your not famous, interesting or important and having people follow you but never read your lame noise will not help you. If you put out good content that is genuinely interesting then people will naturally follow you.
- Maybe some corporations just aren't meant to be on Twitter. Why? They aren't ready and telling them they have to be isn't going to help. Ya, in the long run it will hurt them not to build those relationships and reserve there usernames, but I hate domain/username parking. If companies want to broadcast, spam, not talk to people then Twitter isn't probably for them, yet. Brands are like people, they have personalities and make relationships. I would love to see more brands being successful online, but they have to be ready and open to it. Plan ahead with online policies.
- Don't just fire people for saying and doing things online that you don't approve of, sit down with your staff. I was watching a larger fashion PR agency on Bravo recently and they hired a girl and then fired her for saying she got the job (which she did). She didn't give away anything that was top secret and they didn't tell her not to. Frankly, it's good PR for them. Do you think that was smart or dumb of them? Plus she seemed like she would have been perfect for the job and they where short staffed from recently firing two people. Cautionary tale to prospective employees everywhere.
- Content is king. Don't copy someone's content. If you reference another blogger's content, magazines, or newspapers then link back to their website.
- Don't tag my photo on a picture of your logo. That is so messed up.
- Don't set up a Facebook profile page for your company. It is against Facebook's policies. That is what business pages and fan pages are for. Even if you try to friend me, I'll just deny it and tell you that you need to get a business page.
- Don't use a half naked girl as your profile picture, especially if your a dude. Use a nice professional photo of yourself.
- I don't have thank yous. I think being polite and respectful is awesome. What I don't like is if your entire feed is retweets, thank yous, and woe is me. Fortunately I can shut off your retweets, but can't shut off thank yous. I like them until all you are saying is those two words. If you are going to put out posts at least tell people what for, let us join in without having to stalk both of you. Good example would be ME: "@someone thanks to @jeffreyfortson for the fun photoshoot today, see the photos here flickr.com/jeffreyfortson" or "Thanks to the guys @cocomsp for hosting @tcsmu last night, everyone had a great time. Can't wait for next month" or "I agree with your post re: the persons original post."
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1 comment:
I'm right there with you on corporations avoiding social media if they're not going to use right. No one wants a Twitter feed of press releases and nonsense.
Great points all around too. There are too many people trying to make a quick buck off of social media.
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