Guest post by Bill Swallow.

Imagine you’re at a large social gathering. You float from conversation to conversation, greeting old friends and acquaintances and meeting new ones. You have some interesting conversations with some of the new people you meet, so you hand them your card to keep in touch. At the close of the evening you return home, and your answering machine and email inbox are filled with business opportunities, marketing messages, and random hellos. As you go through them you realize these are all from the people you handed your cards to. What bothers you more than the messages is the context; there is no context, and the messages are not even remotely related to what you were conversing with these people about at the gathering. They are cold-contact messages devoid of any direct meaning to you.

Welcome to Twitter and the direct message auto-response phenomenon. You’ve likely received many of these if you follow more than 100 people. On the surface they seem rather harmless, just a one-off message likely sent as a robotic response to your friending of another person. But have you thought about how contrary these are to the fundamental idea of Twitter?

When you friend (follow) someone on Twitter, you likely do so because of some kind of commonality. Either you are a friend or colleague of theirs, you like what they are saying, or they are involved in something that you are interested in. And when you friend them, you are making a direct social connection. You are interested in what they have to say.

The auto-response direct messaging seemingly running rampant on Twitter lately is anything but social. It is nothing more than cold-contacting a new connection, usually to shamelessly self-market one’s self, though occasionally you might receive a “hey, thx 4 following!” which also amounts to nothing more than noise. If there is one best practice I can advise for Twitter, it would be to not use auto-response direct messages. They undermine the fundamental core of Twitter as a social medium. Auto-replies are anything but social. Instead, engage your readership with compelling public contact, and leave direct messaging to those important private 1:1 conversations for which they were intended.

Bill Swallow is a technical writer and leader of several online communities. You can follow him on Twitter as Techcommdood and read his blog at Techcommdood.com.

Photo by DoubleFeature on Flickr