LinkedIn Etiquette: Time to Silence Social Media Spammers?
I received an email from a loyal reader this morning. Her message: It’s time to start filtering and censoring the LinkedIn groups for MSPmentor, The VAR Guy and Talkin’ Cloud — which are sometimes saturated with unsolicited press releases, event promotions and some reader “questions” that are thinly veiled vendor promotions. What’s a so-called forum moderator (poor old me) supposed to do?
First, I must concede some guilt here. I certainly promote our own webcasts across our LinkedIn groups. But I think that’s fair game since I launched and essentially manage our LinkedIn groups.
Attention. Hello. Read This. Now.
Now, about that third-party spam. In recent weeks, I’ve started blocking some of the louder LinkedIn voices who attempt to post unsolicited press releases and other marketing materials to our groups, especially when they make competitive claims that can’t be backed up. Often, I move the press releases into a “promotion” area rather than the “discussion” area.
Still, I’m trying to figure out where to draw the line. Just how much filtering of the groups should I do? I’m open to ideas and feedback…
Smart Guy
Ironically, just last week I received a social media strategy guide from Jeff James, an industry news analyst within Penton Media’s IT Group. I’d share the guide with you — but I suspect I’d lose my job… (Penton acquired Nine Lives Media, MSPmentor’s parent, in 2011.)
James’ social media document is killer — chock full of best practices and secrets for driving successful social media engagements. I plan to give it another close read tonight. Hopefully, it will help me to more clearly understand what types of content I should — and shouldn’t — allow to be posted in our LinkedIn groups.
Is it time for me to wash away the social media spam?
Great post JP…my social media team and I have been having this very discussion of late. First it was, “wow, linkedin is certainly blowing up, lots of great conversations popping up in rapid succession…neat.” It seems that a lot of folks have noticed as well 😉 In the world of social networking, certainly being able to utilize the more popular platforms to generate interest is a welcome way to promote. But suddenly, you’re faced with a, “it’s certainly noisy in here” perspective, and once again wondering, just what DOES rise above the noise in the world of social networking. Great debate! 🙂
j.
Jeannine,
I appreciate the fact that your team sends me press releases and offers briefings instead of flooding our LinkedIn groups with the press releases, etc.
People I’ve never met seem to have infiltrated the LinkedIn groups to wave their banners… We welcome and love newcomers. But I guess I’ve reached the conclusion that I will no longer allow our LinkedIn groups to be used by vendors as PR newswire distribution services. That’s what PR newswire is for…
But I still see lots of room for vendor-reader conversations on the LinkedIn groups. Readers post questions all the time. Vendors should weigh in with sound advice rather than the latest marketing jargon.
-jp
Joe, we are just starting to build a new group in LinkedIn with the goal of helping to educate and share ideas for and with MSP’s on the value of social media.
We want to make sure (to the best of our ability)that everybody understands how to use these powerful tools to grow their MSP business and we want them to do it in manner that is becoming and accepted in the social media space. I personally believe that vendors should provide 9 pieces of valuable content before one pure marketing piece 9/10.
Vendors can bring a ton of knowledge to the table and I even personally invited some old vendor friends who I know for a fact can provide value to our group. However, we do have one rule for the group and it shows up in our thank you for joining email. Our 1 rule is – No vendor adds or solicitation. If it is not of value to our group as a whole and it is simply marketing then I will politely ask the vendor to leave or block them completely from the group.
The worst experience in the social space (my opinion) is when vendors tweet a press release or show update and then have their team members retweet it.
They need to learn how to use social media properly. Ummm, maybe I will have them join our group?
Thanks again Joe,
Sean Sweeney
Sean,
Thanks for the tips. I’m definitely taking notes as I plan our path ahead. Part of the problem: I’m a control freak and my brain automatically edits clutter out of the picture. So when I see clutter I tend to hack away and eliminate it…
-jp
Joe,
Great article. I believe this is coming true for every forum that allows per say “anyone” to comment. There are many times you write a very educated post and they are followed with irrelevant comments that are simply self promotion or as you referenced spam. I think much of what we see are people and companies fighting to stay relevant but not knowing how to properly filter that notion.
Rob,
You raise a great point. We have always allowed “anyone” to comment on our websites.
– The good news: Readers can get in, share a perspective, and move on without having to register or sign in to share thoughts.
– The bad news: Our spam filter works extra hard to block porn links and other garbage. Plus, we certainly see our share of promotional comments. But generally speaking, we allow such comments as long as those who post perspectives share their names and company affiliations.
There are always tradeoffs and balancing acts. So far, our “open” approach has worked out pretty well on our websites. But in our LinkedIn groups, the volume of promotional materials can be overwhelming. We’re working on solutions…
-jp
I have this problem with a software testing group that I manage. I wrote about it last year (http://bit.ly/jiczKe), but at the moment the action I take at the moment is to moderate every single message that comes in. About 2 in every 10 messages make it through as genuine discussions. The rest are marketing spam and job postings. For many of these we drop a polite email to the offender, most of them just don’t realise that they are not supposed to do it.
LinkedIn use to drive loads of new members to my community (on another site), at one point 50% of people came from LinkedIn, now it is not even 5%.