Don't Do The Robo-DM

As my fever for the flavor of a tweet increases I’ve found new friends, colleagues and fans following me on twitter. Being a polite tweeter I’ve followed these folks back to make sure that I’m constantly flipping between my email and tweetdeck in a kind of haphazard way bordering on a physical stutter.

I happily tweet and follow retweeting those things I find twitterific and irresistible gems of marketing knowledge I want to punt into my personal twitterverse. However, I’ve noticed a trend, neither increasing nor decreasing, just hanging on at the periphery that undermines my whole minimally committed love of the tweet mode of communication: the auto-responder like direct message from new contacts.

Examples of some of the messages include:

“Hi! Thanks for the follow, what’s tweeting in your universe?”

Isn’t that why you’re following my tweets and I’m following your tweets? Didn’t we become BFFs so we didn’t have to ask these questions of each other in such a personal manner? I tweet therefore I’m not asking to be direct messaged about what I’m tweeting.

“Hi, I’m @anemailgeek, thanks for following! We do our best to provide fun and useful insights at: www.example.com”

Right, I forgot I couldn’t guess from your branded twitter page, or your name, or the endless stream of blog posts, retweets and props that you are who you actually are. Wait, didn’t I decide to follow you because I found your website? Do I need to be reminded that you still have this website and that it’s full of useful information or was that inherently the job of your twitter stream? I forget sometimes.

Contacting someone directly through twitter isn’t a capital crime, but it is in a sense counter productive especially because 140 characters for a direct message that is obviously a kind of robotic auto-responder to new follows, is even less personal than a pretty HTML creative that may begin with “Dear Len,”.

Micro-blogging in the twitterverse is about speed and has a kind of immediacy to the information peddled. People are ultimately acting like cyber journalists scooping each other, robo-DM slows down this information micro-pipe-line because it takes you away from reading the tweets and clicking the bit.lys and ow.lys and back into a kind of email paradigm. Except it’s not email, and you can’t make it personal, and you can’t give the attention you might if it were email.

Consider this, if someone follows you, isn’t it enough that they’re following your tweets? Meaning they’re as engaged as they will ever be over this medium. Spare them the robo-DM and let them acknowledge their engagement by clicking your links. It is after the real purpose of the channel, isn’t it?

Cheers!
Len Shneyder
Director of Deliverability & Messaging
Pivotal Veracity | Unica