I consider spam being mail that was never requested by the user. If the user finds value in this “spam,” it is no longer spam. But the risk is if the user believes that there is no value or relevance in what they receive, they will call the sender a spammer.

From a consumer perspective, just because we have an email address or a Twitter username, it doesn't give everyone a right to send us unsolicited mail. If we sign up to your mailing list it is one thing. But if there is an @Reply message from someone who we don't know trying to “sell” us something, I would define that as spam.

At the end of the day, a lot of spam IS marketing, but I don't consider all spam to be mere marketing. And anyone is free to blog or tweet all day long about their products should they wish. They cross the line when they opt people in to mailing lists, send @Replies, and transmit emails to people who never requested the information.

At the end of the day, the Social Web is about people developing relationships and finding information. If Internet marketers want to play in this arena, they need to Pay It Forward by sharing information and marketing themselves in a much more savvy way. I wrote about this in my blog post this week on “What is Windmill Networking” and Blendtec is a great example. They didn't follow 100,000 people on Twitter and spam them with blender ads. They created educational and entertaining videos which they shared and won fans. That is what social media marketing is all about!

Would love to carry the conversation with you offline if you are interested. Please feel free to contact me.

Best,
Neal

We need clear guidelines. The only other observation is that the tweets all look like SPAM to me, and have no value, unless they have link to a blog thats doing knowledge transferr.