Spam is a word that gets thrown around a lot. It used to be pretty easy to determine what constituted spam. If it’s an email you didn’t want trying to sell you something, then it’s email spam. With social media spam has taken a new identity, but what is it?
The thing with social media is that you typically have control over what gets sent to you. Traditionally spam was the use of channels you didn’t have to open up to someone before they could use them. When you get email from a company trying to sell male enhancement pills, it’s spam. But with social media you have a large amount of control over what goes through your streams.
I’ve heard people referred to as spammers in social media when they send out an endless stream of status updates on autopilot. Spam is defined by Dictionary.com as “a disruptive message, usually commercial, sent across networks or email.” What exactly is disruptive? If you have friend or followed someone then you open your network to them. Is a message from them then “disruptive?”
Empire Avenue is an online social media game/analysis tool. Recently one of the highest ranking players was expelled for being a “spammer.” He was sending out 1,000 updates a day on different networks. Obviously no one can send out that many updates of value. But he wasn’t trying to sell anything with his thousands of updates. He was trying to increase his dividends so people would buy him in Empire Avenue. If someone sends out thousands of worthless updates is it spam? And why are you following them if so?
When I think of spam I think about mass auto email systems, auto DM systems, and pretty much something with the word automatic in it. Does it have to be automatic? Is it possible to use automation without being spam?
Spam used to be very objective but has become very subjective. No one used to argue when you used the word spam because whatever you were referring to was by literal definition spam. Now people will argue or raise questions if I refer to something as spam. They either found value in it or thought it was easily avoidable and therefore my fault. So my question: what determines if something is social media spam, or just annoying social media?
