Auto-Invite and Breaking My Window

Peter Kim has an had an awesome post a couple of days ago that really rocked my memory and brought me back to the world of Made To Stick or maybe it was the Tipping Point… In the long run it doesn’t really matter both books are absolutely brilliant.

In his post, Peter talks about the broken window theory where graffitti and *trash* leads to misconduct and chaos in a community. I was relating it (in my head) to social media experiencing an increase in spamming and straight up hard-selling of products and services through outlets like Twitter and Facebook. (Thanks Peter for a great article). I realized that part of the reason why we are seeing a push back from small business owners on using social media is because of the amount of email invites they receive from different networks.

We are all familiar with the “give me all your contacts so I can spam everyone to join MY network” tool that you are pushed to complete when signing up for a network. I am confident that the auto-invite button is contributing to the overall degrading of social media by vagrants and misfits.

I am positioning this argument towards individuals just getting involved in social media. Try not to auto-invite your entire list to a network… it isn’t going to accomplish anything. It is just going to frustrate people who are hesitant to get involved online because of the amount of email and overwhelming content they receive on a daily basis.

Steps To Not Auto-Invite

1. Click Next.

And if you are going to break more windows in social media…Do me a favor and un-follow me.

Have a great Friday!

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