An interesting phenomena happened again the other day and while it's happened before, the intensity of the reaction this time made me smile... and think about an important feature of social media: Accountability.

A person on LinkedIn sent a spam message to all his contacts including me. The reaction was swift and severe. A great number of contacts sent him back varying degrees of negative feedback, some of it rather emotionally charged. As an added bonus, in this case, because some of the replying people copied everyone who received the original message, the "dope-slap" was public.

I think everyone will agree that spam is extremely antisocial and relies heavily on anonymity for its success. Since social media is anything but anonymous, participants must be accountable for their blog posts, emails, tweets and other public comments. If they are not behaving in a "social" way, they will find out very quickly.

So two important contributions result from the use of social media. First, good old spam will be severly curtailed and secondly, people wil be taught social behavior regardless of whether they come into the space knowing it ahead of time.