Recently at an Orange County twEATup I overheard a question from Norman Nayler to Ted Nguyen: “So how did you get a stogy organization like the OCTA to embrace Social Media?” Answer: “I just did it”

For readers not in the Orange County area, OCTA stands for the Orange County Transit Authority. You wouldn’t expect the transit authority to be leaders in Social Media but with Ted’s leadership they are. Ted has brought the OCTA into blogging, twitter, facebook, tweetups and more.  The OCTA even won the top award for new media from the California Association of Public Information Officers (CAPIO).

if  Ted had waited for permission, OCTA’s social media efforts would still be waiting for committee approval. Ted didn’t wait, he just did it. Ted is OCTA’s doer. Are you your companies doer? If you are you looking around wondering why your company is not embracing Social Media then you probably are.

Being the doer, the person who gets things done without waiting for approval, does have it’s risks. You may be stepping on toes or even put your job at risk. But without the doers, the future will be stuck waiting for committee approval.

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