The GroupSwim Diving Board

There is a great blog post on Mashable on this topic.  The gist of it is a guy asked for advice from someone he knows using Twitter.  He directed the Tweet to his friend using the @ sign.  A company picked up on the post with search and contacted him directly offering their services to help him with his problem.  He did not take kindly to being “spammed” and is very upset about the whole thing.

Are you kidding me?

Using Twitter for any kind of communication is fair game as far as I’m concerned.  You sacrifice any privacy or spam protection by using a platform like Twitter that is meant to put communication in the public realm, both the public you want and the public you don’t want.  This guy should have sent an email if he wanted to avoid “spam” or public attention.

We at GroupSwim recently joined the “Twitterverse” for the express purpose of identifying people who may be interested in our services.  I personally have set-up searches for mentions of GroupSwim, Enterprise 2.0, etc.. I don’t reach out unless it is obvious the person is looking for comments or input, but I definitely do it.  I also don’t use Twitter for any communication other than inbound or outbound marketing.  I’m not sure what he or anyone else is thinking by using Twitter if they expect marketers/spammers to respect their “privacy”.  If you use Twitter, you’ve essentially forfeited your privacy relative to any communicating you do on Twitter.  What do you think?