Comments on: Can You Take Automation Too Far?

By: Ajeva

Ajeva — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 16:53:17 +0000

Haven’t we all been guilty of doing automation every now and then? We thought we can get away with it all but you cannot fool your readers, fans, friends or followers. I think one should balance automation and making meaningful interaction. You may automate interesting posts like tips, news, tutorials — but try to make replies or messages more personal. It’s not a numbers game or popularity contest after all.

By: mrohde

mrohde — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 01:26:51 +0000

I agree with most of the examples, especially your automated twitter updates when you are dealing with some of the tools like foursquare. The “I’m at McDonald’s”, “I’m at Wal-Mart”, “I’m at home taking a dump” updates are just obnoxious and annoying.

There are ways to strike a balance, like Jamie does with blog posts.

I do the same with my blog posts and I also have some tools that automate posting content I am reading and want to share but I manually select all of the content.

To Laura’s point, if all I get from a Twitter “Friend” is regurgitated content from their RSS feed and no conversation I quickly find the “Unfollow” button since I can easily aggregate that content in an offline tool rather than a real-time tool.

By: Lara

Lara — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:54:58 +0000

Totally agree, especially on the Twitter/Facebook automation front. There are some blogs that I really enjoy reading who have Twitter profiles, but all they do is send their RSS feed to Twitter without adding anything new to the conversation. I wish I could interact with them via Twitter, but it’s clear it’s just a regurgitation of their posts.

By: Jamie Northrup

Jamie Northrup — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:21:03 +0000

I’m not guilty of auto posting the same content to different networks, but I am guilty of sometimes being lazy and wanting to post the same thing to both FB and Twitter and leaving the hashtags and such on in FB. lol

The only communication that I automate is having my blog posts pushed to different social media/networking websites, I’ve been thinking of stopping this for some, while keeping it on others. I only do it once for each post automatically, but then I’ll promote it manually, trying to place my content relevantly into conversations with others.