Community communications

There’s a thing that happens when you follow one of those blow-hard self-promoting “thought leader” dopes on Twitter: you get an auto-generated “thanks for following me” Direct Message, which includes links to their website, their LinkedIn profile, their PayPal account and whatever else they think they can get you to click on to feed their web analytics.

Back in my salad days of tweeting, I actually thought this was an attempt at reaching out, since reciprocity is the currency of social media. Boy, was I wrong. These entities (not sure they are all actually humanoids) are not the least bit interested in anything you have to say. They’re only interest is in pushing their (often system-generated) promos and platitudes into your timeline in hopes that you’ll retweet.

These days, when I get one of those DMs I immediately mute the moron—they see me as a “follower” and don’t know that I can no longer see their nonsense.

Here’s an example. I follow a lot of accounts engaged in the global support of science, research, innovation and the like. And people engaged in research or innovation often follow me on account of things I tweet. So when @GaryBridgeman followed me, and he didn’t seem to be a spammer, I followed him back. Almost immediately I received a notification from Twitter that he’d sent me a DM!

(Twitter always ends its notifications with an exclamation point.)

The truth, however, was less than exciting:

So I muted him and went on.

  

Then @EUSciComm followed me and I again clicked the follow button. And immediately another DM.

(Yes, okay—the guy did not stand out from the ocean of Twitter egos on the first pass, so my cursory skimming of his profile of the second iteration didn’t flag that he was the same guy I’d already muted and screen-capped his DM for posting here. I can be shallow too, you know.)

This time, old Gary set his bot to pick up my name and included it in the salutation. However, he once again stated that he pays no attention to anything I might have to say. In both instances he invites me to connect with him on LinkedIn to communicate. Yeah—that would be a negative, Gary.

Evidently he does not see the irony in talking about “creating a great community” when he can’t be bothered to either write a personal message or respond to DMs. This does not persuade me that a LinkedIn relationship would be worth the electrons holding it together.