To paraphrase the old professor’s saw about graduation rates, look at the person to your left and the person to your right – if one of those people hasn’t bought anything from spam, then you have. According to a recent study by Marshal, a global security consulancy, 29% of Internet users admit to having bought products advertised in spam. Unfortunately, ruining my Twitter experience is a good business model. If I don’t click through, I run the risk of missing a real follower who might be worth following, so my choices are a) lose time and attention checking out every bogus follower, or b) lose value from the service by failing to connect with people who share my interests. So I click through, and see a profile with that one tweet and close it and delete the email. Now, I like to see who’s following me on Twitter. The default setting on Twitter is to send you an email notifying you whenever you have a new follower, so all day I’ve been getting emails linking to Twitter profiles.
The modus operandi of Twitter spammers is to create dozens or hundreds of bogus accounts, post one tweet to each with a link to the spammer’s page, and follow thousands of people. Today, a new wave of spam flooded Twitter. While the monetary cost of sending spam is small, the cost to the receiver in time, attention, and the disruption of beloved services is great. Of course that means come-ons for cheap prescription pills, penis enlargment and miracle fat-burner supplements, and mortgage refinancing, but it also includes too-frequent updates from companies you’ve done business with, useless “updates” from newsletters you’ve subscribed to, meaningless self-linking on social media, and so on. Spam is any communication that purports to offer a benefit but is unwanted.
#Spam the button free
As the cost of reaching out to thousands or millions of people goes down – to the point where today, it’s effectively free – the possibility to spam goes up. Unfortunately, any medium that makes itself so easy to use to promote yourself as today’s social media also makes it easy for idiots, jerks, and scam artists to promote themselves. Entirely coincidentally, Thursday Bram write a post about marketing yourself shortly after.
#Spam the button how to
In my last post, I talked about how to get the most out of social media sites and services like Digg, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
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