October 2009

Social Media Spam

in Social Media

No doubt, spam and scams are the Achilles’ heel of social media, and some even say they will eventually ruin social media.

People who responded to my last post on paying for social media agreed that they would be happy to pay for using social media, since it would likely kill spam.

Today, Facebook announced that a San Jose, California court has awarded the company 711 million dollars in damages against Sanford Wallace, a spammer who accessed people’s accounts without their permission and sent phony Wall posts and messages.

The judge also referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney’s Office with a request that Wallace be prosecuted for criminal contempt, which means that he could end up in jail.

Facebook notes that “This is another important victory in our fight against spam. We will continue to pursue damages against other spammers.”

This is indeed an important step in the fight against social media spam. While Facebook is unlikely to actually collect the full amount of damages from Wallace, the court sends a strong message here: using social media for spam is not a fun game. It is a criminal activity and will be handled accordingly. Hopefully, this will deter future spammers from using social media for spam.

I still think paying $1 a month for social media accounts would be far more effective in preventing spam.

Would You Pay to Use Social Media?

in Social Media

When Seth Godin said that charging a small fee for using Craigslist would improve the site’s service and usability by preventing spam and scams, I thought that this is not a bad idea at all, and that perhaps we could expand it to social media platforms, and especially to micro blogging service Twitter.

If the spam issue is so bad that Robert Cringley declared Twitter as dead, perhaps it’s time to take measures – more drastic measures than adding convenient spam reporting links – and charge for the service?

Of course, charging – even a small amount – for a service that used to be free could backfire and kill the service immediately. People have become spoiled. They expect the Internet in general, and social media in particular, to be free.

Would you pay $1 per month to use Twitter?

George Clooney Not on Facebook

When asked about his lack of social media presence, George Clooney last month said that he would rather have a rectal exam on live television, performed by someone with cold hands, than join Facebook or MySpace.

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LinkedIn has 50 million users

In a blog post today, LinkedIn has announced that the social networking site now has over 50 million users worldwide, about half of them in the Unites States. LinkedIn is very different than other social networking sites in that it caters to professionals, and to professionals only. While there have been recent changes to make [...]

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Twitter’s Fight Against Spam Goes up a Notch

Twitter recently added a “Report [X user] for Spam” link to users’ profiles. This makes reporting spam accounts easier than before – up until now, you had to report spam messages via a @spam direct message. This is definitely a step in the right direction – Twitter spammers, who mass follow users in an effort [...]

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Social Media ROI

Can you measure social media ROI? What are the success criteria for your social media efforts? And if you can’t measure success, aren’t you wasting your time engaging in social media? These are the most important questions your social media expert needs to answer before you hire her. Surprisingly, many social media marketers dislike the [...]

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Social Networking Use Triples

According to new figures from Nielsen, the amount of time spent surfing social networking and blogging sites had tripled since last year, suggesting a major change in the way the Internet is used. This change in consumer behavior has had dramatic impact on the online advertising industry. Advertisers used to be suspicious of social media, [...]

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