I thought I would do something a little different today and make a play on the Throwback Thursday hashtag (#tbt).  I am in my home base of Atlanta, GA this week and we are currently experiencing a “winter weather storm.”  I put that in quotation marks because by Northern standards, this is a minimal  winter storm.  My visits to my grandmother’s in Chicago as a child and my time spent in boarding school in Pennsylvania have taught me that.  However, for Atlanta, this is really bad weather that they are not really equipped or used to handling.  Here the biggest issue is ice – and this is primarily an ice storm.

I was fortunate to miss the weather even that put us on the national news a couple of weeks ago and I am fortunate enough now that I do not have to go anywhere.  My grateful reflection is that I am thankful to have a career and business that I can conduct from just about anywhere.  If I was still in corporate America, I’m sure I would be stressing about the lost time from work and how I would make it up.  Although it is pretty cold and gray, the upside is that I can stay inside without repercussions.  There are others that are not quite so fortunate.

I am also grateful that although I am currently “trapped” in my home (can only venture out on foot), I have food, water, heat, electricity…and the internet!  Yesterday, there were upwards of 100,000 homes without power in the state and last night and this morning’s snow fall has the numbers fluctuating.  As quickly as they can get people back up and running, another line comes down and cuts off another group of people.  I have been very fortunate.

What are you grateful for?

I am sure that we have all been a victim of a spammer at some point in our digital lives and most of us equate spam with email.  However, some of us may be perpetrators of spam and not realize it.  I see spam as being anything obtrusive, invasive and unwanted.  So, unsolicited emails selling me something or receiving an endless stream of email communications invading my inbox is spam in my eyes.

Now, I understand that in the digital landscape an email sales pitch is similar to a “cold call” in the physical space, but at least customize it and pitch something that is relevant to me.  Pitching a new VOIP phone system for my company is irrelevant to me as the only employee and one that communicates without the use of a phone primarily.

An endless flood of postings on a social media network is also spam in my eyes.  If when I view my timeline, feed, etc all I can see are postings from the same person and a lot of scrolling has to be done to see something else, I consider it spam.  I read this post the other day from Marc Ensign, “15 People Ruining Social Media,” and the Vanisher qualifies as this type of spammer in my eyes.  The Vanisher is not the only person that does this.  Rants sometimes take on this form as well depending on what network it is posted on.  I’ve seen tweet after tweet of one long rant broken up into 140 character bites.  For me, it’s spam.

In the past, I have been guilty of doing a bit of spamming.  At the time, I did not see it as such.  I would billboard, posting the same general message, several times a week or day.  My thought process was the more I posted it, the more people would see it and hopefully commit whatever action I was trying to get them to do.  The biggest problem with that, is that was all I was posting.  When I looked at my posting feed, I realized it was all the same.  It looked spammy and I would not follow me if I was someone else.  The second problem is that it’s annoying.  If they are annoyed, they are not going to do anything I want them to do.

From that point forward I started asking myself a few questions before clicking submit, send, post, etc.  “Would anyone care?”  “Does this add value to someone’s life?”  “Is this completely for my own gain, drivel and selfish in it’s motive?”  Then I apply the golden rule:  Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  If it still seems like a good idea, then I will click submit, send, post, etc.