Yesterday I decided to add some new blood to my twitter stream. I wasn’t planning to bulk follow but I got a bit carried away. I started looking at who the people I respect are following. Then I realized how neglectful I’ve been in following back the people who follow me. So I checked them out and followed the ones who looked interesting. I must have gotten put on some sort of list because I started getting a flood of new followers. I evaluated and followed most of them back.  All in all I think I followed about 100 people.

I wasn’t trying to do a case study on auto DMs but I should have known following that many people all at once would lead to another blog post on auto DM Spam.

In my last post I talked about how a DM is like a personal hand written note. I open it before I open other pieces of mail because someone has taken the time to put in some personal thought into it and deserves a personal response. I get very annoyed when I think I’m opening a personal note and instead I find a mass mailer.

In the past 24 hours I’ve gotten about 150 emails. A typical day for me. 22 of then are auto DMs. That is 15% of my email inbox.  After clearing out the legitimate mail this is what my inbox looks like.

As you can see, the majority of them start with “thanks for the follow…” Followed by please check out my Facebook page, website, white paper, etc. Those things may be important to you but they are not important to every single person who follows you.

The one at the very top included my name, it is the only one that did. It’s still followed by “Please visit us at…” but at least I can see it’s not by a bot and technically it is not an auto DM. Props to @helpmyresume for that at least.

I’m not the only one complaining about auto DMs.  Tee Morris covers auto DM’s in his book All a Twitter. On page 233 Tee writes:

“From Social Media authority Chris Brogan to ReadWriteWeb.com, the backlash against automated Direct Messaging reached such a pitch that SocialToo, an organizer for your various social networks, proclaimed “Time to take a stand – Yes, We’re Ending the DM’s” and eliminated direct messages from it’s options. Perhaps it’s the impersonal nature of the tweet (“I’m far to busy to welcome you so I’ll have a bot do it for you, and while I’m at it go on and visit my facebook page and subscribe to my blog.”) or perhaps it is suddenly being told , “you have a DM!” which usually meas “priority, for your eyes only!” and you find a message “Got a question on how to increase traffic to your website? I’ll show you how!”, but auto DMs are so detested that people are unfollowing and blocking people they just met.”

Clearly I am not alone in my battle over auto DMs

Recently I was researching  a topic in social media. As a result I had several twitter followers put me in touch with their favorite sources on twitter. Naturally I followed the people they recommended and the people doing the recommendations. From one of them I got the dreaded auto DM. I supose I should be glad that I only got one considering I probably followed 10-15 people that night.

My reaction: I find it disturbing that someone helping me with Social Media Best Practices Q earlier today has sent me an auto DM.

Auto DM’er (Sent via DM so name withheld):  Touche! But, the auto DM saves me a ton of time. We single moms have to save time as much as we can:-)

Saves you time? Seriously? Auto DM’ers are filling up my DM inbox and email inbox with messages that say “thanks for the follow. Please buy my crap” or “Thanks for the follow. here is where you can find more crap I’m involved with” If you actually think I might be interested in something you are involved with then tell me, personally.

Picture this scenario; you attend a function in your city and meet many people. A few days later you recieve a hand written note from Jane Smith. It says that it was a pleasure meeting you and invits you to drop by her office any time.  Jane thinks they might have some things at her office you might be interested in or business she can help you with.

Jane was nice enough to take time and send a hand written note and she might have something of interest to you. So, you decide to stop in for a bit, but you enter the wrong door. Jane is not there. Instead there a scanner auto scanning  a stack of business cards that Jane has collected at community events. A machine is printing out what looks like personal hand written notes just like the one you received.

Now how do you feel about Jane. For me, I don’t care what she has in her store or how much she can help me in business. She is pretending to be personal but she is fake and she has waisted my time.

A DM has some similarities to a personal note. I open it before I open the rest of the mail. A DM hits my email box and when I get a DM I assume it’s because someone would like a private response and it is probably something more important than an @reply.  It used to work that way before auto dm’s started filling up my email.

For a while 9/10 messages in my DM box were auto DM’s. That’s when I started unfollowing or blocking auto DM’ers. I simply couldn’t find the real messages in all the “thanks for the follow, please buy my crap” auto DM’s.  How does wasting my time = saves you time? It’s an unnecessary and unwanted message in my inbox. If you are fake and want to waist my time in favor of “saving” your time, then you are a spammer and you are not worth my attention.