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Gevril and Haurex Italia dinner during Baselworld in March 2011 with Larry Brauner standing in the background.
Baselworld 2013 is taking place April 25 to May 2 in Basel, Switzerland.
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Oct
25
Anti-Social Media Marketing
Filed Under Networking and Marketing Strategy, SPAM, Social Media and Social Networking Sites
I’ve already written about different types of SPAM, the reasons people SPAM, and alternatives for SPAM free marketing.
In this article I look at four kinds of social media SPAM, or anti-social media marketing as I sometimes call it.
I also share several ideas for coping with social media SPAM. Although we cannot stop SPAM, we can try to mitigate its effects.
- SPAM Messages - These are the unsolicited commercial messages sent to your Facebook inbox, appearing in your Twitter replies, or plaguing you on other social networking sites. You should block the scoundrels, and report them too if they appear to be really awful.
- Comment SPAM - These are ads or links on your profile pages, blogs, forums or guest books. Beware of innocent looking blog comments such as “Great post. Keep up the good work.” The commenter is only looking for the link back to his site which most blogs (including mine) do provide. Require approval of all comments and use a SPAM filter (such as Akismet for Wordpress blogs) to help you with the job.
- Social Bookmarking SPAM - This is when someone bookmarks only his or her own content on bookmarking sites (such as StumbleUpon or Sphinn) which prohibit this. Be careful not to do this yourself.
- SPAM Blogs - These are blogs that aggregate search results (for profitable keywords) using feeds from services such as Google Alerts, and then publish these search results. They exist in order to spam search engines and other blogs and boost their own sites’ search results. If you have a blog, you’ll receive comment SPAM from them indicating that they’ve linked to you. They hope to get a juicy link back from you. If your SPAM filter fails to kill off their comments, be ruthless and do it yourself.
Creating SPAM blogs is often called autoblogging by the spammers.
In a November 2006 article, What is Autoblogging and How Does It Work?, Gobala Krishnan stated:
No matter how good you get at autoblogging, you’re never going to produce high quality sites that attract a loyal fan base using autoblogging methods. Nothing beats content that is original and written by a human being.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. 
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16 Responses to “Anti-Social Media Marketing”
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Great piece. The most amazing experience I have had online is on Facebook. A guy was stalking me to the point he said he was going to split my head open.
I immediately reported it to Facebook, and the next day my account had been suspended. I could never get any explanation from Facebook.
It’s a shame a handful of bad apples have to cause so much trouble for the millions who just want to have a good time, learn, earn and enjoy this wonderful medium.
Hi Larry!
I’ve found the most irritating spamming going on at the Ning sites. They’re shameless. I guess they think it’s okay to advertise in that way there but it’s extremely annoying. Thanks, for a great post.
Deb
Just had to respond to Jake and give my sympathy and support for being a good apple. Yes we should report spam and NOT tolerate content spam in any form, and especially anti-social behavior which includes intrusive and hyper aggressive sales and marketing pollution. Jake should not have been shut down by Facebook.. He should appeal.
We must reclaim the media as a free market forum yet decorum and courtesy must be the rule of the highway lest we abdicate our duty as netizens to be good stewards. I am reassessing my own habits and reducing the amount of time I spend on a computer at the expense of real relationships. Automation can become an addictive response that kills creativity and we must fight nasty trends that have insidious affects on the quality of our lives.
As long as spamming is profitable, it will continue. Neither legislation nor technology will help much.
We can try to educate and reform spammers, but educating their customers/victims seems to me more promising.
I get those “Great post. Keep up the good work.” and other similar comments in my blog all the time. Akismet always pick them up as spam. Even if aksimet doesn’t I delete them.
Thanks for the continuous reminder of these spam messages, comments, ads, links, etc.
Appears that you’re “on top of things” Gillian.
Spamsters should all be drowned at birth; on the flip side, the increasingly bizarre sob stories from Nigerian fraudsters after my bank account details do make me laugh out loud sometimes.
Great Post ! It’s very important to know all that and I think too that we can do something to educate and reform spammers .
I hold no hope for sinister spammers.
However, I tend to lean more towards the point of view held by Valenino than that of Wheathills when it comes to black-hat and gray-hat marketers.
Unfortunately for us my business partner and I have experienced first hand the Nigerian fraudster spammers on Craigslist. Since August, our poor tenant has had over 10 calls and visits from people who thought they were getting a mansion in the burbs for pennies on the dollar.
This is very helpful information. It is sad that Jake got his FB account suspended after reporting spammers. I don’t understand that. I am one of those people who leave “great post, keep up the good work” but I sincerely mean it. My blog is written simply for the fact that I love to write and hope people enjoy reading it.
I appreciate your sincerity Delores.
Social media marketing is really the trend these days. I market most of my products through social networking sites.
The last comment was an example of comment spam. I let it go through so that you could see it, but I made the link into “nofollow” so that they don’t get the “dofollow” link they were hoping to get.
I do social media marketing specially when promoting a new website or an affiliate product. Social media is more effective than offline advertising, in my opinion.
[…] are now as common on social media as they are on email (Larry Brauner aptly calls it Anti Social Media Marketing), but this post is directed at those who have good intentions but are in danger of becoming […]