Spammers, All

How many Friends do you have?

Not on Twitter or Digg or anywhere like that. I mean Friends with a capital F - real ones. Now, compare that number to how many social media "friends" you have. My guess is that, if you practice SEO for a living, your online friends out number your real world friends by at least one order of magnitude.

A couple of days ago, rebecca over at SEOMoz complained that Digg Shout-Blocked her. When she attempted to send a shout to her entire fan base, she was first asked to narrow down her list of friends before selecting which ones would receive the message. She didn't like this and points to her Digg usage stats as evidence that she's not a spammer and thus Digg should allow her to do what she pleases. She has 568 friends and says:

I mean, all I do is befriend people who become fans of me. The whole point on having friends on Digg is so that you can share stories with each other, and the Shout feature allows you to share stories with a large number of friends vs. having to contact them all one-by-one. Why then would Digg penalize me for having too many friends? Did I hit some mysterious "max number," like once you get to 500, it's too many?

Blindly befriending everybody who becomes a fan of you on a site like Digg is evidence enough that you're not using the site to truly find like minded internet jockeys. And, blindly sending shouts to hundreds of your friends is not "the whole point of having friends on Digg."

As professionals, we should be honest with ourselves. Sending a story to 500 mostly anonymous people on a social bookmarking site is spam. You're doing it with the hopes of garnering votes, most of which will come from folks who never even read the story.

So, the next time you're having an identity crisis, count your friends both real and online. The bigger the multiple of online friends to real, the bigger spammer you are.

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