On LinkedIn a direct message basically costs $5 USD. This makes InMail (supposedly) much more efficient than E-Mail.
Why?
The fact that you pay for the message is a signal that you value contacting the person you are contacting.
On twitter, there is no monetary price for direct messaging.
Consequence: Direct messages on twitter are being abused. hypios, for example, gets so many automated DMs that we stopped reading them long ago and (as twitter has no "select & delete all" option) we don't even delete them any more.
So on twitter, response rate for public messages goes up.
It can be argued the principle is the same as on LinkedIn
Why?
1. Public messaging gives visibilty to the person you are messaging (you signal that you value her/him)
This functions like payment. You could (and we did) argue that twitter is an economy where attention is the currency. Mentioning someone on twitter (e.g. @hypios) is therefore like paying for a private message on LinkedIn.
2. You give visibilty to the content of your message.
If you are criticizing the person (or brand), (s)he has a stronger incentive to answer when your criticism is public (this is why people tend to send public letters for political causes), because otherwise other people might think the criticism is justified and that the person (brand) being adressed has no answer.
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Interesting post. I agree that DM's on twitter are a waste of time due to the spam you get and the mentions are worth more. However, I don't think it will be long before the @ mentions start to get abused too. Part of the problem is that business users tend to follow back those that follow them resulting in the junk DMs, personal users won't have this same issue as they are less likely to follow back someone they're not interested in. Perhaps the spam will result in loss of business use for twitter in the longer term unless twitter can do something to allow filtering of the messages. | |
Posted by gymnag on Feb, 08 at 3:42 AM
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http://www.hypios.com
