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Blog Comment Spam Hall of Fame
We all get spam comments on our blogs. Most of them are simple to recognize and we mark them as spam, but every now and then, a blog spammer gets a little creative. I share some of them with other bloggers I know and they share some with me. We joke about having a blog comment spam hall of fame for the more creative ones. The following blog spam comment was added to a friends blog recently and I wanted to share it.
I must express some appreciation to this writer just for bailing me out of this type of circumstance. As a result of surfing around through the world-wide-web and coming across basics that were not powerful, I was thinking my entire life was done. Being alive minus the strategies to the problems you’ve resolved by way of your good posting is a crucial case, and the ones that could have badly affected my entire career if I had not discovered your web site. Your knowledge and kindness in touching a lot of stuff was excellent. I am not sure what I would’ve done if I had not come across such a thing like this. It’s possible to now look ahead to my future. Thanks very much for this skilled and results-oriented guide. I will not think twice to suggest your web site to anyone who should get care about this issue.
So, as you see the blog posts we write can be so important as to save lives. The next time someone tells you how blogging is frivolous, share this with them to show you are actually writing important, life-saving content.
What is the most creative blog spam comment you’ve ever received?
Professional Management for Business BlogsRumors of the Death of Business Blogging is Greatly Exaggerated
I read an article in Inc. Magazine about Business Blogging being on the decline. Nothing could be further from the truth, regardless of their survey of the Inc. 500 companies they did.
From the article;
“Is Blogging Dead? Not quite, but a recent survey of Inc. 500 companies reveals that it could be on its way out as a marketing tool.” (The study was done by the University of Massachusetts. They talked to 170 business executives)
First of all, a university studying anything related to Internet Marketing is ridiculous. Most universities don’t even teach Internet Marketing yet. When I approached the University or Miami and the University of Texas to recruit interns I was actually shocked by the responses.
The business professor at UM said, “We don’t teach Internet Marketing, because it’s a fairly new field”. That was just 2 years ago. UT has a public relations and an advertising course and that “touches” on social media, but they also did not have an Internet Marketing course or one that includes it as of this time last year. In addition to that, even if they were to hold a course on Internet Marketing, they would begin it with Social Media. Not the best place to start.
Secondly, 170 business executives is not a very large sample for any survey. It also did not say whether they were marketing executives or the VP of taking the trash out.
One other thing, what big corporations are doing does not reflect what small to medium size businesses are doing at all. Corporations do not lead, they follow. They are the slow adopters of everything Internet-related.
Take a look at domain names. In the early 90′s, small biz owners, entrepreneurs and speculators were buying up generic, keyword-rich domain names. By 1975, every single word in Webster’s Dictionary had been registered as a domain name. Yet, cars.com wasn’t registered by Ford, GM, Chrysler or any other automaker or dealer. Neither was auto or autos.com. Other generic names like that were ignored by the major corporations, except for a few. Proctor & Gamble, Microsoft and others did register generic domains early on.
When corporations realized they had missed the boat by waiting too long, they had their IP Attorneys lobby ICANN and the US Commerce Department to ban generic domain names. A similar push was successful in Australia, but failed here.
I only added this to show how studying what large corporations do is not the way to find out how anything is trending.
Another quote from the article
“It’s not that these businesses stopped blogging, ; it’s that they never blogged in the first place”
So, the study concludes that since some of the big corporations still have not adopted blogging, then blogging is on the decline. Wow, talk about a leap.
I love the next quote
“A lot of the Inc. 500 companies weren’t in existence in the early blogging years”, says Ganim Barnes. “They are newer companies that moved directly to FaceBook and Twitter.”
So, they do not realize how much blogging would help with their social media marketing and since they don’t realize it, blogging is dead. Ignoring blogging will make it go away? Also, it brings up another question; Just FaceBook and Twitter? Wow, that does make them smarter than us poor bloggers.
Ostrich Marketing
If I don’t use a particular marketing tool, that means it doesn’t exist and doesn’t work. There are a lot of companies, especially large companies that ignore most of the marketing tools at their disposal. The Inc. article suggests that by ignoring these tools, these companies are the smart ones. Hunh?
Now for something completely different, the article goes on to say;
“Still, the companies that do have blogs are very happy with them. Ninety-two percent of those businesses called the platform a success, up from 86 percent in 2010. FaceBook, though more popular than ever among Inc. 500 companies saw its success rating decrease 3 percentage points in 2011.
So, the study reveals that blogging success is on the rise and FaceBook successes are on the decline a little and the overall conclusion they reached was that blogging is dead per the beginning of the article.
If you are going to use social media, a blog is an extremely helpful and important tool. You can’t make your entire point in a tweet, unless you have awfully small points. You need something to share daily or even several times per day and your blog posts are good for sharing on your social networks. Getting your friends and followers to come to your blog means you have a better chance to do lead capture or make sales.
If you didn’t use social media at all, a blog is still and extremely helpful and important tool. It adds fresh content to your website every time you post. It is the most efficient and economical way to do so and search engines like Google like fresh content and reward you with traffic.
That’s my take on the study. What’s yours?
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Social Media – Do the 1st Businesses who adopted it have a real advantage?
Image via CrunchBase
The way we do social networking has changed, but in reality, social networking has been around a very long time, all the way back to BBS, Chat Rooms and Forums. I mean, what were we doing? Interacting with others online, sharing links and information, and networking with others for business opportunities. That is social networking.
There are a lot of people blogging about social networking and that early-adopters of it are way ahead of the game, but is that true?
A quote from the Brick Marketing Blog;
Social media is no longer “new” media. It’s been around awhile and the businesses that have embraced it from the start are way ahead of those that saw it as merely another fad that would eventually die out and are now struggling to catch up.
I disagree for a couple of reasons.
1. Those who first starting using these new social media tools like FaceBook, Twitter, etc. didn’t really have a grasp of how they can benefit their online marketing efforts. Sure, a few got it right, but hundreds also got it wrong and made huge mistakes. It was basically guesswork in the beginning. Now that we have had a chance to learn from other’s successes and mistakes, we can create a better social networking plan for our clients. So I don’t believe getting in early means late adopters are struggling to catch up. I think it means we can avoid some of the mistakes and benefit from those who succeeded.
Image via CrunchBase
2. Google+ is still in its’ infancy, so we are still at the beginning of that and it will surpass FaceBook in social media importance due to combining social media with search. So I believe that now is the perfect time to be starting a new social media campaign that combines social media optimization with search engine optimization, using Google+.
What do you think? Do the early adopters really have an advantage or has Google+ evened up the odds?
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FaceBook You Must Add A Valid Email Address Annoying?
Why does FaceBook require a WebMail address and consider an email address that goes to a valid domain you own as invalid? They accept Gmail, Hotmail and a ton of free emails anyone can get anonymously all over the web. But, if you own your own domain name and set up your own email, and use that email address for your FaceBook profile, you get “You must enter a valid email”.
This bugged me until I read this in the help section.
“It says my email address is invalid.”
“Unfortunately we do not support email addresses with generic prefixes (e.g. info@, webmaster@ etc.). You will need to use a personal email address that does not contain this type of prefix. Since email addresses of this nature are typically used for organizations and businesses, we do not allow them to be used for personal Facebook accounts. There are no exceptions to this rule”
I’ve encountered something similar at just one other website, ClickTale.com where they wanted me to change my info@ address to something else. Eliminating info@ and webmaster@ as valid email addresses is still pretty ridiculous in my opinion. But if you’re having trouble with using your email address at some websites, this might be the reason. It seems to be a growing trend to disallow those words before your @domain-name
