The old standard of organizing 200+ business cards after a conference or event is officially dead.  People these days have taken to adding you to social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook in lieu of cramming another few dozen biz cards into an overly pregnant Rolodex.  The problem I’ve always faced is who to add/follow/block based on the little information you have on these folks.  Sometimes, it’s better not to add every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Think about it from the ‘marketing yourself’ point of view.  People judge you based on your associations just as much as they judge your character and professional ability.  Here are my simple rules for following/blocking friend requests on social media sites:

1. Twitter: Does the user have their Bio and URL filled out.  Do I know from their biography what it is they do?  Does the bio give me a substantial reason to follow what this person has to say in 140 characters?  Is the URL spammy?  If the user doesn’t take the time to add a photo and fill out their bio and URL, I’m not going to take the time to browse through their latest tweets and discern the benefit of adding this person to my feed.
2. Twitter: Is the username easy to remember?  Nickmattern, Turbolapp, SlightlyShady, Delta, and JQuipp are all super easy to remember. They relate to the person, their brand, or their company.  3azys7r33t (easystreet) is not easy to remember and quite frankly, makes me convulse in seizures when I look at it.
3. Twitter: Does the user have 1 update, 500 followers and 500 following?  If so, it’s spam, do not follow.
4. Twitter: Is this the person, the brand, or the company.  Many entities have multiple twitter accounts.  For example, a CEO may have CEONAME while the company uses COMPANYNAME and the brand happens to be BRANDNAME.  Are you more interested in the company, person, or brand?  Cool if all 3, but consider the reason you want to hear from them in the first place else you’ll end up jamming your tweet stream with endless messages.
5. Twitter: Are all the user’s responses @someone?  Nothing worse than looking at a Twitter account and seeing 100 straight @friend1, @friend2, @friend3 tweets with no real relevance.
6. Facebook: Does the user have an appropriate profile photo? The last thing I want is clients/associates/friends of mine looking at my friends window and seeing an inappropriate or immature photo of my ‘friends’.
7. Facebook:  Does the user have Mafia Wars, Quizzes, or some other dumbass Facebook app filling their profile’s wall?  If they do, there is an EXCELLENT chance that no less than 200,000 times a day, you will be innundated with invites, status updates, and other worthless garbage from this user.  Stay clear of these folks.
8. Facebook: Does the user have more than 300 friends?  I always look for the folks and companies who bulk add everyone with industry keywords.  I hate this practice, it dilutes the quality of their offerings and exposes me to OTHER people who mass add/follow, which only wastes a ton of my time.
9. LinkedIn: Do I really know this person or are they trying to sell me something.  It’s one thing for a local merchant or fellow member of a trade association to contact me and pitch a relevant product, it’s quite another when someone is simply throwing spaghetti on the wall and hoping someone, somewhere will purchase their product.
10. LinkedIn:  When someone “introduces” through another party. I always look at the accounts of both people to gauge the relevancy of having these people in my lists.

On the same note, here are the events and habits that guarantee someone will be deleted from my follow/friend lists:

1. When someone autoposts links to “online radio” urls.  blip.fm and all those, totally worthless.  Some folks Tweet EVERY SINGLE SONG they have on their online radio playlist, resulting in 50-60 tweets a day in my feed, 100% of which I won’t listen to, find any relevance in, or realize any value by clicking.
2. When someone overuses hashtags.  #I #mean #seriously #guys #do #you #really #need #to #do #that?
3. The use of racial, offensive, or tacky language.  Many people extend their tweets to other social platforms like blogs and Facebook, so when my feed comes up on one of those platforms with your “F*uck the da*m world” tweet, it doesn’t reflect well on me, nor does it help me with my site’s ranking.  God help you if your tweet gets indexed/cached on my site, you’ll never not have me silently destroying your online properties…
4. When someone you meet at a conference does nothing but ENDLESSLY post their innermost thoughts (“I woke up today with wet bedsheets, it reminded me of Spring in Nantucket as a child”) and never really posts anything worthwhile, they get the axe dropped.

I’ll add to these periodically, but the moral of the story is manage your social lists as best you can.   What do you do to control the chaos in your social circles?

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