Flout.me is fun, but should be flogged and reported
I did what I guess most of you did when you saw the first entry of flout.me in your Twitter timeline: frown. Then I saw another one. And another one. And smiled. I clicked the URL, authorised the app, then laughed out loud Looks familiar? Well, there’s more to it than that: Flout is a [...]
Consequences far outweigh the positives with spamming social data streams
While I am not overly surprised that spammers have found that Google Plus (indeed any social network) is an awesome place to sell or otherwise try to engage people with their get rich quick, enlarge your anatomy or other scams, … Continue reading →
Twitter spam – a problem? No. Curation is here
A few times a day, I get a tweet directed at me from someone I don’t know, who neither offers something related to what I have recently tweeted. The first few times that happened, a few months ago, I clicked the URL and ended up at some site after being redirected via more than a [...]
5 Techniques To Deal With Spam: Open Letter To Twitter
I love Twitter, but lately, I am getting annoyed by Twitter spam and I’m not the only one. I don’t want Twitter spam to become email spam. I don’t want to whine about that either, so I spent some time thinking about what Twitter could do to deal with spam. Consider this an open letter [...]
Spammers have been busy but I like the new twist
Spammers are always busy trying to get their message to you, for what ever it is they are plugging, but I have noticed a new spammer that is doing keyword tagging along the way, making it much easier to find weak websites with no filtering for comments, making it a spammer’s paradise. We always [...]
Enslaving People Since 1967 … And Not Getting Any Smarter
I came across your website cloudave.com, and would like to propose a link exchange between your site and AlliedTime.com. Allied Time USA has been offering employee time clocks and time systems since 1967. Ok, so they’ve been enslaving people for over four decades. If they had the slightest clue about what we do here, they’d [...]
Purchasing influence, followers and popularity
Over on Techcrunch they have a message about using Amazon Mechanical Turk to help a person raise their influence, followers, or general popularity. Unfortunately most of the conversation centers on Quora, which is an awesome question answer system (until it exploded in popularity) that gave people an indirect link to people who were actually doing [...]
Those Who Can’t Do, Teach. The Hidden Dangers of Email.
Oh, the irony. Communispond, the Agency that excels sending the same horrendously dumb email year by year actually has the ***s to hold a webinar titled: Writing Skills: The Hidden Dangers of Email: Emails are so quick and easy to write – and it’s so simple to hit the Send button. But most of us [...]
There’s PR. And there’s Dumb PR. And there’s Even Dumber PR. And No CRM System Can Save Them.
The best CRM system can’t help you if your sales / marketing team is clueless. Here’s a ridiculous email I’ve just received. Name removed to protect the (not-so) innocent X. Y. kindly requests a meeting Hi Zoli, In celebrating our 40th anniversary, I’ve been given the privilege to manage the relationship between your organization and [...]
The Care and Feeding of Industry Analysts – Take Two
Some analysts (?) spammers just won’t learn. I ridiculed this “research report” a few months ago (quoting old post below): The Care and Feeding of Industry Analysts The Top 10 Questions The Care and Feeding of Industry Analysts Will Answer For You Include: 1. What are the ten deadly sins NOT to commit when working [...]
The Care and Feeding of Industry Analysts
Some of my email spam is actually quite entertaining, like this offer for a “research report”: The Care and Feeding of Industry Analysts The Top 10 Questions The Care and Feeding of Industry Analysts Will Answer For You Include: 1. What are the ten deadly sins NOT to commit when working with an industry analyst [...]
ScanCafe: Great Service, Lousy Spam
That’s yours truly on the left in full glory, albeit a bit scared at a photographer’s studio. Why black-and-white, you may ask? Well, there was no color photography back in 19xx (date censured). This formerly black-and-white photo has turned sepia, but that may just be acceptable over 4 decades (oops, I let it slip out), [...]
Just a quick note about Twitter SEO and Social Marketing
If you are planning to use Twitter to help raise buzz for your company, there are some things you do need to note. Many Twitter users use Autofollow – but many do not, and fake following is quickly becoming a scourge of Twitter, meaning you will be blocked by some users. As some folks know [...]
Being Upfront Gets Better Results than Trying to Sneak It By
I’m generally not tracking the “post ads to your social networks” movement, be it sponsored blog posts or tweeting ads to your followers on Twitter. There is one aspect to it that I think is most important: disclosure. Robert Scoble has a post up, More thoughts on in-Tweet advertising, where he notes that he unfollowed [...]
Spammers start trying out jokes to sell stuff
Most of us at least look at our spam queues on our systems on a semi-regular basis, what is always interesting is to see the variances in tactics that spammers are using to try to get their stuff into your system. This time it is all about jokes, ones my kids would like. There is [...]
