I've often used this line in my Social Media training workshops, "When is junk mail, not junk mail".  This is in reference to an environment where we are inundated with direct, online and other forms of advertising bombardment.  We tend to deal with it in different ways.  Some need zero inboxes, very seldom sign up for free or discounted deals and, therefore, not being subjected to a flood of new advertising missiles, and others use separate emails for that junk.  Spam laws and making it easy to unsubscribe to promotional emails has become the norm.  However, no matter how you handle the inordinate amount of information coming at you, when you want what they have to offer, it's not "junk".  But, what about the "junk" we keep getting in Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking applications.

<a title="Brian Solis" href="http://hbr.org/search/Brian%20Solis#" target="_blank">Brian Solis</a>, just wrote this article for the <a title="Harvard Business Review" href="http://hbr.org/" target="_blank">Harvard Business Review</a>, <a href="http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/09/social_medias_impending_flood.html?cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-marketing-_-marketing092211" target="_blank">Social Media's Impending Flood of Customer Unlikes</a>. In it, he identifies one of the potential (and, I think he would say "likely"), backlashes from customers who are tired of being inundated with "junk mail", especially on <a href="http://www.facebook.com/2degreesmedai" target="_blank">Facebook</a>.

<a href="http://www.michaelhyatt.com" target="_blank">Michael Hyatt</a> just created a stir when posting a blog article, <a href="http://michaelhyatt.com/how-i-unfollowed-108698-people-on-twitter-and-reclaimed-my-inbox.html" target="_blank">How I Unfollowed 108,698 People on Twitter and Reclaimed My Inbox.</a>  The stir was centered around his decision to "unfollow" those who helped him gain the influence he has on Twitter.  One of the etiquette elements of Twitter has always been, "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours".  However with the increase of promotion only Twitter messages, he finally "had enough" and decided to unfollow the people who helped him gain his online notoriety while determining that the greater good in this instance was to reduce his inbox clutter.  I may not necessarily agree with his position on this issue (if you take this out to it's ultimate logical conclusion, no one would follow anyone, we'd simply post all of our messages into a public stream and use lists and segmented groupings/searches to find what we wanted--that may achieve a cleaner stream but, in some ways, defeats the intent of Twitter and online engagement, in my humble opinion), it does support, to some degree, <a href="http://www.briansolis.com" target="_blank">Brian's</a> prophetic conclusions in this article.

I've also stressed the importance of making wise engagement decisions when it comes to posting updates.