There’s a growing annoyance brewing in the social networking world. People that don’t know you asking to be connected to your network so they can work or sell to your contacts.

Right now this is just annoying, but if left unchecked, it will too quickly grow to the point that it injures the effectiveness of these valuable social mechanisms. And for me and my evangelical ways, it makes it harder for me to convince someone new to social media systems if these spammers waste time and make the systems more difficult to manage.

At first, when I started getting these odd connection requests I tried to research who these people were so I didn’t run the risk of slighting a business acquaintance. But now, the demand has outgrown my available time, so if I don’t know you, I just say no.

Many discussion threads are debating social media “barriers” that will curtail these nuisance connection requests. Services like Linkedin and Facebook are taking a few steps to slow the problem, like forcing connection requests to include a statement of your relationship with the person to whom you are requesting a connection. This makes it much easier to sort out if the person making the request really knows me or simple want to use my list. I do hope that they make it easier to see the full, unlocked profile of the requester in future upgrades.

So why is this a big deal?

Well, for one thing it’s just plain rude.

It’s like walking up to someone you don’t know and asking if you can come over for dinner tonight to meet their family and friends.

It’s an intrusion. And puts me in an awkward position of having to refuse your request to be a part of my little club.

At first I felt badly saying no, and refusing connections to people I had met. I do a lot of public speaking and often meet folks that I don’t really know, but who later ask for connection to me. It’s one thing to be my friend in Facebook, but quite another to be in my network in Linkedin. The first time I let someone connect to me and then they used my network to try to troll and sell their services, I immediately became wary and much more particular about who was in my network. At one point, I started over.

Another reason social media spam is a big deal is time. I don’t want to devote a lot of time to managing my social network. I want it to work for me. So I’m not very interested in fending off unwanted requests from people I don’t know.

Guidelines

Here are a few guidelines for judging if you want to include a person in your network or not. I wouldn’t say yes to the request unless the answer is yes to ALL of these simple questions?

- Do you know them?

- Do they know you?

- Do you respect them or want to do business with them?

- Do you want to keep in touch with them?

- Do you want to help them?

Granted, there may be hundreds of other good reasons to grant someone into your network. But make sure they aren’t just using you to get to your network for reasons other than mutual benefit. The harm this kind of social media spam does you is much greater than the harm to the offending social spammer.