On Twitter: Difference between spam and noise

Last week at 140 | Twitter Conference I attended a panel on Twitter strategies and real-world case studies. Overall it was a solid panel with some talented speakers (Jeff Pester, Bryan Rhoads, Warren Whitlock, etc). Unfortunately, amid the good stuff, there was one not-so-little thing that made me twitch: the overuse of the term "spam" on Twitter.

A lot of audience members were asking about "Twitter spam" and the panelists were supporting the very loose use of the word spam. I was sitting with a person who works in social media for a large security company and I leaned in and said, "Is it me or is that not spam?" He agreed. Just because someone or a company is chatty on Twitter doesn't mean that he or she is a spammer... or spamming you. Sure, companies can often over-market and that's a huge mistake, but they are not spamming you if you have opted in to follow them.

Let's start with a visual demonstration. This is spam:

I don't follow this company. I have no idea what I said to make this person think I wear hats with flowers on them (I look nothing like Mayim Bialuk) but they decided to send me two unsolicited @ messages suggesting ways I can make that happen (never going to happen). I was annoyed. I responded promptly and said "Please stop spamming me." The message was unsolicited. I have no interest in this company's business and I don't follow it. And I am certainly not going to start. I have received similar messages when I have mentioned hotels, airlines, shampoo, make-up, etc. All unsolicited and rarely useful.

What to do? What is noise? -->

"Spam is an unsolicited commercial message; key word is commercial," said Mike Murray, CISO of Foreground Security. "Spam is not when someone sends a message that you view as annoying. Spam requires that there be a benefit to the sender."

What do you do about such spam? Cry. No seriously, ignore it. Call them out for spamming. Report them to Twitter. There's a fine line drawn between companies with poor marketing practices who intersperse dumb ineffective tweets such as the one above with dialogue, and Twitter doesn't have the bandwidth or is it a priority for them to monitor content at that level. However, as the business grows, and users become more fed up with this type of spam, that could change.

That all said, here's an example of noise:

Yes, this is me, babbling about something that may or may not (likely not) matter to my Twitter followers (though I do find many like to laugh at me). I often have several of these random type tweets throughout my day. However, I do not target anyone with these tweets. I post them because Twitter is so deeply integrated into my life that I'm often in the middle of a private moment and say, "Is it OK if I tweet this?" So randomness happens. Yet my followers have opted into following me. I don't start randomly sending @ messages to people who in this case, might care about keys. If people don't want the babble they can opt out of it.

"Noise is not spam; noise is more like those old email forwards that your friends used to send you. That is not the same as email spam," Murray said. "Spam is designed to sell something or do something for the person who sent it. just because you have friends who annoy you doesn't mean they are spamming you, it means you need new friends."

The lesson? Be cautious about what you label spam versus noise. You might upset some people and you diminish the serious spam problem that does exist on Twitter.

Want some noise? Follow me on Twitter.