“Are you following me [First name]? Hmmm? Are you following me [First name, Last name]? Are you?”

That slightly butchered Deniro quote comes from Jim at Obsessed With Conformity. Jim used to shoot that as an autoDM to his new followers. The responses were mixed.

Some folks caught the Deniro reference, were interested and responded to him. Others didn’t responded anyway, and were turned off once they realized it was an autoDM. Turned off and unfollowed.

I don’t autofollow, so I don’t receive a steady stream of these. They do come in though. The percentage has dropped off significantly where I receive one back for a follow. This doesn’t bother me at all.

Unfollowing hasn’t been my response for them, even when it’s obvious. Lately though it’s been less obvious. The auto responders are getting smarter and allow my name to be included and the messages don’t sound automatic. It makes it more tolerable I guess. Tolerable if they aren’t trying to sell me something, visit their MLM page, or tell me how to get 10K Twitter followers.

Honestly folks. AutoDMs are anything but personal. They are the Twitter equivalent of SPAM. Yes, SPAM. Unsolicited and often advertising like in nature. And yes, even if it’s come chat with me type message, it’s still advertising. So STOP IT!

What’s your take on autoDMs? Hate them? Use them? What’s your success rate with responses? Did you create a landing page for folks to visit that you include in the autoDM? What’s the drop rate? Do you autodrop folks with autoDMs?

So you’ve joined up on Facebook and Twitter, and the contacts and friends are rolling in. The steady stream of updates has gone from fun to near overwhelming. Your in person friends are getting lost in the shuffle. However, you know all about the latest Podcamp now, and can tell where the next Pulver breakfast is at without even thinking. Is it madness? Too many contacts?

What’s a person to do in this situation? It’s time to trim down my friend. Stop; don’t balk now. You are moments away from relieving the stress of too many contacts. Too many? Yes, too many, and no arguing that there are so many interesting folks out there. Heck, I’m one of those.

Got your attention? Ready to cut down? But how, that’s the question. Who can you cut from your social networks? You can’t leave Aunt Suzie off right? Well how about Scoble?

It’s time to figure out who you’ll be benefit from following. Here’s a few tips to help out:

1. Unfollow celebrity types that aren’t following you. This one will be the hardest for most folks to follow because of fear of missing out. Here’s a little tidbit; most of the folks are not just putting out their stuff on Twitter or Facebook, they also have a blog or blogs that they are posting too, often daily. Robert Scoble is an excellent example. He not only uses socnets, but all of his real productive work is show on his blog, FastCompany.TV, Ustream.TV and his KyteTv channels. If you want to follow him, follow him there.
2. Unfollow all non celebrity types that aren’t following you. A little easier sacrifice to make for most of us. These are the folks that you’ve probably added because your friends have them as a contact, or because they are friends of the celebrity types you were following. JUST DROP THEM ALREADY! Apply the rule of what are they doing to move you along your path here. Chances are, very little.
3. Unfollow companies on your socnets. Unless they are honestly engaged in two way conversation and you are honestly an active participant in that conversation, drop them. It’ll clean up your stream of plenty of stuff you weren’t probably reading anyway. Again, these companies most likely have blogs you can follow via RSS rather than the random Twitter or socnet update.
4. Unfollow your prolific friends. That’s right, your friends. Question whether they too are engaged in conversation or just sending out tones of updates. Heck, I’m one of those sometimes. I’m very prolific on a couple of my socnets, and some of my friends have had to unfollow me because they can’t see anyone else’s updates or at least they are harder to find in the flood.

If after doing those four things you still have too many updates coming your way, then maybe it’s you that needs fixed. Get yourself some caffeine, a little ginseng boost and dig in. And maybe, just maybe take a reflective look and see if you are one of those that someone else might have to unfollow or unfriend.

Cheers,

Todd, tojosan just about everywhere, follow me if you dare