Dear spammer – please get a real job!

Posted by Fiona in business blogging, social media on Oct 1st, 2009 | no responses

I love the internet and social media in particular – but I see ‘red’ when I see people abusing it… four instances come to mind straight away…

A friend of mine prints photos onto canvas and recently mentioned she discovered a photo site where you go in the draw to win prizes for uploading photos of your kids. She contacted them and offered some of her products as prizes. I’m always interested in who’s doing what so checked out the site – and alarm bells started clanging.

The site was all about uploading pictures of your kids (into different age categories) for the chance to be in to win weekly prizes. There were no contact details of the site owners – just a contact form and there was no ‘about us’ page – basically no one owned this site. There was nothing else to it – just pictures of kids. There’s some sick people out there… and while this site may have all the good intentions in the world (though if they did, why don’t they include blogs, forums and other activity rather than just kids pictures?) – it looks dodgy to me.

Another example are those blog sites that contain RSS feeds of other people’s content. The owners ‘steal’ your content and mash it all together on their site (along with lots of google ads) – again no one owns the site and the site isn’t usually about anything in particular; it’s just clogging up the internet, hogging domain names and search results and annoying people like me by stealing my content and putting it somewhere I don’t want it and didn’t authorise it to be.

But then I read this post from Duct Tape Marketing and his philosophical attitude thawed me out somewhat – he’s pragmatic (there’s nothing you can do, so if you can’t win – get clever) and he doesn’t waste energy getting upset (like I do) instead he’s found a clever way to add his signature and details to his RSS feed so when his content is used elsewhere, all his details and links are included. So that means more links back to his blog, readers know he’s written the content and can search for more. Check out John’s post on how to do it – and to soak up his pragmatism.

Thirdly are blog spam commenters – they’re getting cleverer and more insidious and annoying… Recently a client ‘approved’ a handful of comments from six different people from the same URL all slamming his services and recommending a competing service (which was their URL). My client thought it was balanced to have some negative commentary on his blog – yet really all they were doing was spamming his blog – in a meaningful way – to get readers to check out their own website and join their community. URRRGHH!!!

Fourthly are the email newsletters that I’ve ‘apparently’ signed up for. Either I was working way too late after a wine or two and thought I couldn’t live without receiving the e-learning for pets in Spanish newsletter – or it’s spam. And because I’m afraid to click on the ‘unsubscribe’ button for fear of confirming my email address, and thus inviting a deluge of even more spam, the newsletter keeps on arriving. Damn you spammer.

Finally – I loved this tweet: Dear Spammer, If you start your email with “Dear Sir” it will be automatically deleted. Love, Ma’am

What makes you see ‘red’ online?