Posts tagged as: spam

How not to suck up to a blogger

Guy Kawasaki has listed some of the techniques that you can use to get bloggers to write about your new product. My favorite from Guy's list is to send an email with the following message:

It's easy to see why Guy is the first person enrolled in the tech evangelists hall of fame. He also has some important advice on how not to suck up to bloggers: Let me state this advice more forcefully. NEVER spam a blogger. In the past week I've received three emails aimed at getting me to write about a new website, two one of which is clearly are a bulk mailings from people someone who may never have read my blog. I could be flattered to be on a list of tech bloggers who are considered spam worthy, but I have a very low threshold for spam. When it comes to my personal account, I always apply filters immediately that trash email from the sender's address. I'm going to start applying the same practice for email sent to this blog's address, but I'll take it one step further. I'm going to produce my own tech blacklist of companies that send me spam about their new product. If a company lands on this list, I will never mention them in a post, forever. I won't include Megite and Edgeio this time, but they have it has now been warned.

So, am I becoming a blog diva? Do I think I'm so popular now that I have to ask to be left alone? Of course not. I love getting email from people building cool new software. I'm just afraid of what will happen if every new Web 2.0 company starts following the lead of Edgeio and Megite. I can just see it now, some PR flack at a Techcrunch Silicon Valley party bragging, "Dude, we spammed all those tech bloggers, and you should see the links we got back!"

Here's a better method. When a blogger writes something that you like, or that might relate to the area in which you want to launch a product, send an email with a supporting comment, or a joke about the content of the post. If they respond, then follow this up some time later with another. Even better, do this on your blog. Then, when you have a product you want to hype, go ahead and send an email, but you still have to make it an individualized message. At least have the decency to get your programmer to build an email merge that includes some details related to that specific blogger.

So feel free to contact me (adam AT darwinianweb DOT com) about your new site or product. Just be warned, if it is clearly a mass mailing, it will backfire.

(Update: Mike Arrington has reminded me that I must have submitted my email address to the Edgeio landing page at some point. At age 50 I can barely remember what I had for dinner yesterday, so I obviously forgot this fact. I've crossed out the references to Edgeio, which I'm sure is a great product. My bad. Young people still say that, don't they? In fact, Mike has offered me a phone demo. Maybe he'll even let me sit on his couch some day. )

Spammers are rational

I just noticed that I've only received one spam email today. I'm pretty ruthless about filtering spam on my mail server, and never giving out my real email to websites, so I only get about a dozen spams a day through to my email client. The dramatic drop for New Years day shows that spammers are making a rational decision about when to email. Intellectually I've always known they are working with a business model, but when you read the ridiculous stuff they send it is sometimes hard to believe. There must be enough fractional cost that they have decided today isn't worth it.

Joshua Schachter, part 2

I went back to Harvard tonight for Joshua's second session at the Berkman Center. What I found most interesting was his philosophy towards users. This shows up in his handling of both user tagging and spam attacks. He said that he is constantly getting demands from the more control oriented users to restrict the use of tags, either by establishing stylistic rules, such as capitalization and the use of special characters, or by constraining the tags that users can create. He refuses to do this, and always strives to give the users as much freedom as possible, even if it breeds confusion and inconsistencies. As a control freak I find this troubling, but I think he is right in this case. Tagging is so new that adding constraints now will cut off the more ineteresting behaviors before they have a chance to emerge.

Another example of this philosophy is the way he handles spam attacks. He has found that the site gets spammed every couple of days, with such common tactics as entering thousands of copies of the same URL, or entering thousands of URLs with the same tag. He seems to have good back-end systems to monitor this, but instead of returning an error message, as most programmers (including me) would do, he just has the system ignore these entries and hide them from the public. He says that eventually the spammer gets the idea and just gives up. He says that if he were to present an active defense, the spammers would just use this to find new methods of attack. So instead of trying to hit back, he just wraps the abuser in cotton and waits until they get bored. Very bright.