What’s Next Now

I uncovered this article in Forbes by Mike Schaffner, a blogger and director of information technology for The Valve and Measurement Group of Cameron in Houston.  His article is entitled “The Death of Social Media.”  In it, he moans:

“Many of the people that I get as followers on Twitter seem to offer nothing more than a continual stream of advertisements. It seems that a growing number of “Internet marketers” are taking over Twitter, trying to get business in teaching people how to grow their follower counts and sell advertising.”

He is right, but only to a point. What he does not seem to grasp is that Social Media is “self-policing;” that is, there exist far more tools to kill spammers and other pests than there ever have been for email, which is far less spam-proof. But it takes a bit of diligence to keep one’s social media streams clear of unwanted spam.

I use Socialoomph.com one or two times a week to vet my Twitter followers. There I can “ignore” – not reciprocate follows of troublesome new followers. I can also block them so that they can’t see me and I can’t see them.  If the spammer is particularly bothersome, posting nothing but ads or links to “how to make money on Twitter” or “come see my pictures,” there’s button that reports them to Twitter as a spammer.  You can’t do that with email if some unscrupulous actor gets your email address and sells it to others causing a tidal wave of unwanted garbage.

If anyone with nothing useful to offer has multiple thousands of followers, I don’t want to be on their follower list either.  Except for users who are doing company branding or are celebrities in their own right, it just isn’t reasonable to expect that having 10 thousand or more followers or reciprocated friends might be useful in any sense.  I like the concept of “Dunbar’s Number,” first featured in the book The Tipping Point, that theorizes most people can only manage about 150 meaningful social relationships.  Back in 2007, Tobias Escher wrote a good piece on this social brain hypothesis.

Most social media tools, and especially the ones that are popular, offer options to help users eliminate just about any content they don’t want.  FaceBook’s recent change, broadening permissions to a default “everyone,” can easily be throttled back if only you take a couple minutes to dictate specifically what content you want to see and what content of yours that you want to share only among close friends.

So, Mike Schaffner has valid complaints, but he is just dead wrong about the ramifications of them.  As people become more proficient in managing their social media spaces, and as companies like FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others devise ways to make their user experiences less spam-susceptible, this issue is likely to become moot.

It makes no sense to conflate social media’s growing pains with mortal flaws.

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