Don't SPAM Your Fellow Social Network Community Members!

Ok, you decided to implement social media marketing. You have been actively engaging in LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and other popular sites. You carefully accept friend, follower, and fan requests. Then it hits you like a ton of bricks ... you’ve just been spammed by a ‘friend’!

Facebook and LinkedIn publish your email address on your user profile page for all your ‘friends’ to see. And many ‘social marketing barracudas’ use this personal information and decide that it’s fair game to now send you unsolicited, unwanted and un-opted in emails that are typically promotional in nature OR trying to get you to hire them for their services.

Remember, if you didn’t ‘opt in’ to receive someone’s promotional-type communications to your personal or business email address, than those emails are spam - plain and simple.

Don’t engage in this abusive practice.

If you wish to correspond with a fellow social network community member, use social marketing etiquette and either post to their wall or send them a direct message thru the social media community platform. For instance, Facebook has a way where you can ‘direct message’ friends so it’s private to that reader and not a public post for all to see. This way, you’re not invading this person’s privacy and sending correspondence to their ‘personal’ email address.

When I receive messages of this nature I not only pay them no creed as the user is typically inauthentic and desperate for business -- but I also un-friend the person immediately. So it’s a lose/lose situation.

This is a blatant disregard to the social community members as well as just bad marketing.