Twitter issues and spam

Well, apparently twitter had some issues yesterday. In typical fashion, the peeps at twitter aren’t really talking about the causes of the issues, they only talk about the symptoms of what happened. Apparently, it may or may not have had something to do with twitter getting rid of spammers.

The mention of spammers in the status report made me wonder:

What criteria does Twitter look at when they flag you as a spammer?

They say that they delete spammers on a regular basis, but what makes someone a spammer in twitter’s eyes? Actually, that begs the bigger question of what constitutes a spammer?

Let me ask you this: What criteria do you use to determine if someone is a spammer or not?

For instance, I’ve been on a couple of email lists where the publisher sends an email out to the list every day. On one list, they would send out useful information about upcoming events, or training messages etc. and an occasional product offer. On a different list, the publisher would just pimp every product under the sun.

In both cases, since I opted to receive messages from the publisher, I know that it’s technically not spam, but I feel strongly that the second person was spamming. If you send me email, on a daily basis, that is not related to what I signed up for, you’re sending me spam.

But, that’s why God invented the unsubscribe link.

A word of caution to you my fellow marketer, is that you should be mindful of the types of messages that you send out to the people on your list. My suggestion, is that for every message you send selling me something, send me at least two messages that don’t sell me anything, but rather point to something of value that you discovered that is pertinent to the reason I signed up to your list.

I’ll be more likely to buy from you if I don’t feel like all you ever do is try to sell me something.