You have to wonder who well-known UK retail chain Habitat were taking their Social Media advice from when they launched their Twitter account last week. With a 20% discount offer to promote, they set about getting the word out right away. The problem was, with only a few followers to their new account, how would they get anyone to take notice?
Their answer was to spam popular hashtags with their marketing message. #Apple, #phone and #mms were all spammed with news that “Our totally desirable Spring collection now has 20% off!”. They were just some of the tame ones; in a blatant attempt to piggyback on the interest in the current troubles in Iran they used #MOUSAVI too.
Can you image having a product named ’spam’ and then having ‘bad spam’ getting named after your ‘good spam’?
It might have taken a few years but the people at Hormel Food Sales have finally come to terms with the bad public image their product has. Now they have released this new ad compaign cleverly using the Internets lingo to promote their product.
They even have a website, fanclub and online recipes at Spam.com. You can sign-up there and become a member. Just make sure you double-check your spam folder for the regsitration email…
So what is next? “SPAM & FAIL”? Maybe “SPAM and ROFL”?
Maybe the NSFW “SPAM & NSFW” version with a whole lot of meat in it?
A few of my friends are still stuck at Hotmail. I know because at least one a month one of them unknowingly spams his or her AddressBook when their accounts get hacked. I don’t even warn them anymore because I find the whole issue just too embarrassing.
Sometimes I ask them why they don’t move. The usual answers are that they don’t see the benefit, are used to the interface but mostly it is because they have an email archive dating back years and all their addresses in there.
For that last issue Google has now released a very useful “Import everything into Gmail” feature. It will be available to new accounts and they will slowly roll it out to all existing users over the next couple of months. This is how it should work:
Click the Settings link.
Under the Accounts and Import tab, click the Import mail and contacts button.
In the new window that opens, enter the email address of the account you’d like to import contacts from. Click Continue.
Enter the password for your other email account and click Continue.
Select all the checkboxes that apply:
If you choose to import contacts, the information in your contacts list in your old account will be imported to your Contacts section in Gmail.
If you select the Import mail checkbox, your existing messages in that account will be imported to your Gmail inbox.
If you want, you can also select the Import new mail checkbox so that messages sent to your old account for the next 30 days will be imported to your Gmail account. These messages won’t appear in Gmail immediately once they’re sent to your other account, but should update within a day or two.
Finally, you can automatically apply a label to your imported messages to indicate that those were sent to your other account.
Click Start Import. The import will continue if you leave the Settings page or sign out of Gmail.
Your contacts and/or messages will be imported. It may take 24-48 hours before you see your imported messages, so don’t worry if they’re not there as soon as you click OK. You can check the status of your import by clicking the Accounts and Imports tab on the Settings page. Once the import is complete, you’ll see a confirmation message at the top of your inbox.
If that doesn’t work the feature isn’t rolled out for your account yet. More information can be found at this “Importing contacts and mail” document at Gmail. Let us know if it worked out for you!
Well okay, I actually receive an average of 2160 spam messages a day. I don’t actually read any of those because my mail is checked for spam first at Gmail, than at Me.com and finally in Apple Mail. I end up deleting 10 to 20 spam messages from my inbox a day that aren’t caught somewhere along the way.
But today I read two spam messages. Here they are:
I received these within seconds of each other and of course they are were completely automated. I smiled when I read the first one because it is such a nice example of how people can screw up with technology.
My emailaddress is bomega@me.com (yeah sure, send me more spam, I don’t mind) and as you can see the clever developers at ‘CGT Consult’ had their computer analyze that and and conclude than I must be “B. Omega” who works at “Me.com”.
The reason I’m sharing this with you is that it was just such a great example of how NOT to use technology. I couldn’t have asked for a better example to prove a point I want to make.
Technology: Enjoy In Moderation
We all love the personal touch: a friendly word, a hand on our schoulder, the sound of our own name and the bartender that knows what we drink. Unfortunately technology makes it far too easy to become distant, cold and impersonal. It is just too easy to spam your whole address book. Copy list, paste in BCC field, press send. Annoy 1000 people in three clicks. Done.
The trick to technology, the secret, is to use technology to make your life easier but stay personal, at every level. The challenge is to use cold technology to warm up your communication and strengthen your relationships. Sounds easy enough but technology keeps seducing us to take advantage and show our bad sides.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Contacting 10 people personally is more effective than spamming 1000 strangers. Give it a try and find out for yourself.
Written on 17th March 2009
51 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
In a short video interview with WebWorkerDaily (posted below), entrepreneur/marketer/ex-Apple evangelist Guy Kawasaki shares his favorite web application. What’s interesting is that it’s a tool most of us would never have heard of, it’s a Twitter app called Twitter Hawk.
The application uses Twitter Search to automatically source particular terms, and when mentioned, sends automated tweets directing people to a particular site.
In Guy’s interview, the Alltop founder, uses the example of someone mentioning “Fashion Week” in a tweet. Guy will then have Twitter Hawk set up to tweet that person reminding them that they can learn all about fashion at http://fashion.alltop.com.
The question is, is it spam? Is setting up an automated process to tweet people who mention a topic that your site could help them with…spam? Is it spam if it wasn’t automated? You can see the alltop Twitter account here, judge for yourself.
Know these messages? You open them and the first thing you see is a HUGE list of addresses in the TO or CC field? Don’t you hate that? And after you get the first one it seems like 50% of all recipients start replying too and also don’t know the difference between the REPLY and the REPLY ALL buttons?
Well, it seems that some people have found a way to turn a bad thing into a good thing.
Someone recently confided a secret to me which I’m happily sharing with you here. This person has been taking advantage of less technical people at conferences, popular websites and other larger groups who accidentally send a mail to all their contacts and use the TO field instead of the BCC field.
What you do is simply hit the REPLY ALL button as soon as you get one of these messages and, like you don’t know what you are doing, write “Hey thanks for the message! Have I told you about my new project at http://domain.com?” and send that message.
Cruel? Yes.
Effective? Yes!
Why? Read on…
It is a simple way to spam (and yes, it IS spam) a bunch of people with your personal message without risking much. Even if people are annoyed they will blame the first person sending out that mail more than they blame you for replying.
Another great side-effect is that by replying to all you make the whole thing even more embarrassing for the original sender. The more embarrassment you pile on the higher the changes are that they will never make the same mistake again.
I haven’t used this form of marketing and don’t think I have the guts to do it. What do you think? And what should we call this form of personal promotion? Carbon Copy Communication? Reply All Advertising? Re-direct-mail?
Written on 23rd November 2008
1 COMMENT Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
As part of a marketing campaign for Google Message Security, the service based on the acquisition of Postini last year, Google have created an intriguing little tool to calculate how much spam is actually costing your company.
To calculate this, you’ll need to enter things like; i) number of employees with email, ii) number of workdays per year per employee, iii) average hourly salary per employee, iv) average number of spam messages per day per employee, v) number of seconds wasted with each spam message.
Google then produces a figure based on how many days (and dollars) in lost productivity this represents. Naturally, it also shows you how long it would take for Google’s service to pay for itself…the main motivation behind the tool.
The results are an average and the of course costs vary according to the size of your workforce. Also, some people are more susceptible to spam than others and therefore take longer to detect spam than other people do.
Adam Dawes, a Google product manager said “We know in these tougher economic times that companies are trying to figure out how they can save”.
Google itself need to strike down harder on spammers using Gmail accounts to spam from. Richard Cox, chief information office with the Spamhaus antispam group explains “If you could see how many anonymous Gmail drop boxes are being used as the registration addresses for domains that are being used in spam, you’d understand just how much this is costing the community,”
On the right here is a SpamCop Graph showing worldwide spam over the last 7 days. As you can see the was a drastic decrease of spam on Wednesday. The reason for this decline in spam is that last Tuesday two Internet providers cut off McColo’s (Site is down) connectivity to the Internet.
The firm was suspected of offering hosting service to, as the Washington Post describes it: “international firms and syndicates that are involved in everything from the remote management of millions of compromised computers to the sale of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and designer goods, fake security products and child pornography via email”.
Several spam watching companies noticed a huge drop in spam worldwide. Email security firm IronPort estimated that spam levels fell by 66% after Tuesday.
It is not just good news that this one particular host has been taken offline and we see a sudden decrease in spam. More important maybe is that spam might be a smaller problem to fix than we originally thought.
Maybe the 80/20 rule is applicable to spam too. Maybe if we can catch 20% of the companies making spam possible we will actually stop 80% of all spam sent worldwide. That would mean that a solution for the spam problem is within reach.
We might not be able to stop millions of spammers worldwide, but we sure as hell should be able to stop a few big ones.
Computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD) have been spamming us. They admit it too. In an effort to get a better understanding of the deeper workings of SPAM they infiltrated a network of SPAMMERS and sent out almost 350 million e-mail messages within 26 days. To find out how effective SPAM actually is they set up a fake pharmacy campaign but showed an error message when people actually submitted their credit card details. They found out that only 28 people actually bought something which means they got a 0.00001% response rate.
“Taken together, these conversions would have resulted in revenues of $2,731.88—a bit over $100 a day for the measurement period,” said the researchers. The network of hacked computers they used to send spam controlled millions of PCs and sent out a lot more messages which the researchers estimate to generate about $7,000 a day or $3.5m a year. Not bad but not huge either. As the researchers concluded: “The profit margin for spam may be meager enough that spammers must be sensitive to the details of how their campaigns are run and are economically susceptible to new defenses.”
As it becomes harder to hack PCs and people are less eager to click on spam maybe one day sending SPAM will just become uneconomic. I sure hope so…
On August 21 Twitter announced it would turn up the heat on spam. They introduced some measures to keep spammers from abusing the system including a new rule that forbid people from following more than 2000 people. Unsurprisingly spammer did not give up on twitter and are now finding new ways to game the system.
On the right here is a screenshot of my Inbox with Twitter notifications. As you can see these are clearly computer generated usernames.
Twitters new anti spam measures seem effective up to a certain point. Yes, the accounts are now suspended and show a message explaining that this might be a fake account: “This account is currently suspended and is being investigated due to strange activity”. Unfortunately the current fix only becomes effective after the damage is done:
It seems the sign-up process is currently too easy to automate and will keep attracting spammers looking for an easy way to reach an audience. The fight against spam will be an ongoing battle for Twitter. But you can help too! If you see a clear Twitter spammer just Tweet the following:
Written on 22nd June 2009
12 COMMENTS 
You have to wonder who well-known UK retail chain Habitat were taking their Social Media advice from when they launched their Twitter account last week. With a 20% discount offer to promote, they set about getting the word out right away. The problem was, with only a few followers to their new account, how would they get anyone to take notice?
Written on 18th May 2009
Written on 17th March 2009
In a short video interview with 
Know these messages? You open them and the first thing you see is a HUGE list of addresses in the TO or CC field? Don’t you hate that? And after you get the first one it seems like 50% of all recipients start replying too and also don’t know the difference between the REPLY and the REPLY ALL buttons?
Computer scientists from University of California, Berkeley and UC, San Diego (UCSD) have been spamming us. They 
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
