- I will not join your mafia, tend to your crops, find your lost puppy or swap aquariam fish with you. Can’t you get the hint…. Knock it OFF and LEAVE ME ALONE!!! Everyone must understand that all of these addictive little games they sign up for spam everyone on their contact lists.
- Stop sending me requests to be a fan of your favourite causes, celebrities or your friends businesses.
- If we have never met, never ever talked, in fact I dont even know you existed till now why would I be your Facebook Friend. Facebook is for personal contacts. I share my personal photos, thoughts and information to FRIENDS ONLY…. GET IT! Stuff I want to share with anybody who is interested is done through either a fan page, Twitter or a blog.
- If you are an affiliate marketer just wanting to flog me stuff, a spammer of any kind, a pornographer trying to get me to watch your latest video……. I WILL DELETE YOU!!
- There is no prize for collecting the most Facebook Friends or Twitter Followers. How can you follow 20,000 people on Twitter? Have you no life at all that you spend all your time reading other people’s tweets? I WILL DELETE YOU!!!!
- Exactly like in real life I dont like being stalked on Twitter or Facebook …. If I delete you, say no to your request to be my friend and you keep coming back trying to be my friend and follow me I will block you and report you…. I PROMISE
- Linkedin is a Business network of people you have done business with. You say that we worked together in your company but I would remember it if we worked together taking photos of properties in Perth I really would…. BUT I DON’T KNOW YOU!
- You absolutley do not have to ReTweet everything. I checked out Twitters terms and conditions and nowhere does it say that you have to retweet everthing that someone sends you. How about being an individual and just SHUT UP IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO SAY YOURSELF.
- I know I have a profile on LinkedIn but that does not mean that I want you or your recruitment company to find me a new job. I dont want to meet with you, I dont want to send you my CV … JUST LEAVE ME ALONE!
- Whether it be on Facebook or Twitter, if you post 10 or 20 times per day you are ANNOYING THE HELL OUT OF ME and you should know by now what happens next..
3 minute read
23 Comments
Emily Sim
Fantastic Glenn, absolutely with you.
p.s – promise to tone down my twitter account.
Glenn Batten
Emily… and anyone else on my Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin connections
Whilst I had at least one to two people in mind for each of those points… I have deleted everyone concerned so if you are still there it was not you.. 🙂
If I have deleted you…. well.. thats another story entirely.. 🙂
Steven Brett
Oh, and don’t forget reading other people’s whinges.!
p.s. tongue-in-cheek of course.
Lara Scott
Hi Glenn
Priceless list – this has made my day.
Thanks for having the rant that gives perspective to the use of social media for both business and pleasure – both my own and what I see online.
Cheers
Lara
Glenn Rogers
That about sums it up, I don’t find any of them at all useful.
Whats wrong with email ?
Must have missed something here because every man and his dog is using social networking sites and the creators are spending their days on huge yachts in Monaco.
Nick
Ah isnt life so much easier without any of those accounts? 😛
Peter Fletcher
Feel better now Glenn? 😉
Stephen
Great article, and way to true.
Ben Elton wrote a book basically about Social Media gone scary, its called Blind Faith (came out in 2007). You would throughly enjoy it based on your rant. 🙂
Peter Ricci
My favorites are the people who truly believe they are doing good when they join and promote a group like “say no to cruelty to puppies”, (who thinks it’s right?) or my favorite of all time was when Michael Jackson died and a friend posted “it always happens in 3’s” as a reference to Ed McMahon, Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson.
…. I could not help but point out she was off by about a million kids who die from a lack of clean drinking water and basic food and medicine each day 🙂
Seb
I’m sorry, but if you’re receiving all that spam then you only have yourself to blame. I only qualify people I know to be my fb friend. True I don’t have 1,000 friends but I am actually interested in what they have to say. I also turn off most notifications, and if a new app slips through the cracks I immediately check the option for them not to notify me again. In linked in there is a privacy option regarding recuitment groups contacting you. Finally I keep my personal and business social media accounts completely seperate and have different email accounts for each of them to segregate.
Charlie
Haha! Love the list – it’s those self-pumping FB updates that annoy the hell out of me – if you love yourself so much, get a mirror!
But – that doesn’t mean all social networking is bad – it’s just like email, or the phone – a way to communicate, keep in touch and brand (but not a short cut to doing this though). It can be very powerful if used correctly – so don’t dismiss it out of hand.
What’s the ROI on social media? This great 4 min Youtube video gives some nice stats … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypmfs3z8esI or this excellent NetRegistry post along the same lines: http://tr.im/QnVv
Tony Wiles
I’m right there with you Glen. In fact we were talking about this at our weekly meeting yesterday. One aspect immediately became clear during the meeting was most of us didn’t understand the distinction between a friend and a fan.
You have made this very clear. Thanks for that. I will no longer feel guilty not participating in all these stupid games and invitations to do strange tests etc.
A new member of our staff from North America told us that the use of Facebook in Oz was very different to the way it’s used overseas.Pretty much the way it looks like you are going…… and now me
What beats me is where does everybody else find the time for this stuff. I could do with at least another 10 hours in the day
Glenn Rogers
Now Peter Ricci, you are one of the flock with this –
Follow us on twitter
Mark
Great article Glenn… I liked it so much that I re tweeted …oops…
Glenn Batten
Each of these three social networking (although Linked in is technically a Business networking solution) all have their place.. It just when people push the boundaries and start using it in a way that impacts negatively as per the 10 items in the list that I get pissed off…
Use, don’t abuse.
The perfect example is point 8.. Retweeting an article now and again is ok especially when it was not originally circulated to most of your followers… but retweeting everything is pointless so is tweeting every article you ever read or find interesting.
Nick
Hahaha Mark I just got the irony from the ReTweet widget next to the article. 😛
Peter Ricci could you put a little bit of code in to remove the widget just for this article?
Marie
Such a rant – and yet it makes no difference to the number of offences.
It
mac
Sounds like you are one of many esteemed writers on this subject Glenn; this is from Steve Rubel,
“First, while games are huge on Facebook, I really don’t care about my friends’ gaming activity. I am not alone. I don’t care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia” has attracted over five million fans.
That’s 5% of the 100million on Facebook!
Sadly for a lot of the folks in here, I’m betting a lot of folk ‘out there’ would add, “I don’t want to be pestered by real estate salesmen”, as well 🙂
Glenn Batten
Marie… you read my mind… already half written before this one was published.. Maybe later this week or next week it might be up .. but not today!
Greg Vincent
Great post Glenn. There was already a lot of noise happening on the web via email, unfortunately Social Media notifications end up adding even more emails to a persons inbox.
One of the problems is that facebook, twitter, etc know that the email notifications about updates, etc helps drive people back to their site.
I have switched off Twitter email notifications, etc & only read them when I get a moment to physically go onto the site.
Looking forward to your next instalment. Cheers 🙂
Greg Vincent
Glenn, I just received this & couldn’t believe the timing.
“Nicole became a fan of Find Out Who Has Blocked You Now on Facebook and suggested you become a fan too.”
Aaron Meehan
Point 8 is a cracka! I dont know how many people are thinking they are making a contribution by re-tweeting everything they read.
You have to give it to Twitter though they owe a lot of there succes to the retweet.
This is an interesting Twitter cas study by the Harvard Business organization. http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2009/06/new_twitter_research_men_follo.html
And another by CNN, “In fact, a whopping 73% of Twitter accounts have tweeted fewer than 10 times according to a new report from Barracuda Networks, a Web security company”. http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/10/technology/twitter_users_active/?section=money_topstories
Ive know another species that behaves similar to a twitter user group – Sheep!
Rachael Lord
Very funny (and true) dummy spit Glenn!