Tag Archives: spam

A “Personal Note” From a LinkedIn Connection?

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More like spam, if you ask me.

LinkedInThe other day, I got an email message from someone I don’t really know, with the subject line “A personal note for Maria Langer, from one of your Linked In connections”

Here’s how it began:

Maria,

You and I are connected on Linked In, and I’m happy about how easy this makes it for us to stay in contact and to get to know each other better. Following key events in your professional life in this way is awesome and inspiring.

I hope you feel the same about the ability to follow me. If not, then you can stop reading, log in to your Linked In account, and “unfriend” me. I won’t be offended, just a bit disappointed that I’ve failed to inspire you and that I have not (yet) made a significant positive impact on your life through my work.

You can go straight to my Linked In profile, here:

I’ll leave out the link and even the name of the person who sent this.

This is a “personal note”? If it was so personal, then the writer would know that I don’t post anything on LinkedIn so there are no “key events” he can follow there. “Awesome and inspiring”? Not on LinkedIn.

That aside, what followed was an extremely lengthy message full of links to this person’s social media accounts, websites, online profiles, Kickstarter campaigns, etc. It goes on to tell me about this person’s professional history, projects, and efforts to write the software he used to send me his spammy message. The message went on and on. 3114 words! (I pasted it into Word for a quick word count.) I didn’t read it all. Why would I? It was spam from a stranger. But the gist of it was that he was trying to get financing for a new venture and was apparently having trouble with the SEC. Or he wanted to change an SEC rule. Or he just expected people with better things to do with their time to drop everything and spend an hour or more of their lives reading his message and following the dozens of links it contained.

To me, this is what LinkedIn is all about: people using social media to achieve their professional goals by tapping into their “connections” — even if those connections are tenuous or with people who likely don’t give a damn.

I know that some of my friends rave about LinkedIn as a valuable resource for getting work. But I haven’t seen anything like that. All I’ve observed about LinkedIn is that it’s a source of spam, usually from LinkedIn itself or strangers.

When I went online at LinkedIn to sever my “connection” to this person, I discovered I had about 30 LinkedIn connection requests waiting for me. I only knew 2 of the people who’d requested a connection. The rest were complete strangers, most of whom had absolutely no connection to my industries (writing, computers, aviation). They’re just building up connections, likely so they can say they have a ton of them and possibly to spam them in the future.

Anyway, I hope I don’t get any more spam from this person. If I do, I’ll be reporting him to LinkedIn.

Not that I expect them to do anything about it.

What Part of “Leave Me Alone” Do You Not Understand?

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Seriously?

It seems that every time I register a software product or sign up for a website or give anyone my email address for any reason whatsoever, a whole bunch of new email crap results. For the “reputable” organizations, I dutifully click the link in the email message to get off the list they’ve put me on. It usually works. For the rest, I just click the Junk button to flag it as junk and let my email app take care of it.

But lately even the “reputable” organizations don’t seem to understand when I tell them — using software tools they provide — that I don’t want to receive email from them. AOPA is notorious for this; they seem to make new email lists and subscribe me to them as quickly as I can unsubscribe.

Microsoft both annoyed me and made me laugh this morning when it sent this email message:

Email from Microsoft

Just getting the email pissed me off. I don’t want to receive any kind of product announcements, news, etc. from Microsoft. I don’t care about Microsoft.

But what cracked me up was the following line:

Did you know your current contact settings have cancelled our email communications to your inbox?

Yes, I did. But apparently those settings don’t mean shit to Microsoft when they send me an email message to tell me that they’re not allowed to send email messages to me.

Needless to say, I did not click the Re-Subscribe Now link.

Sheesh.

Another Social Networking FAIL

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Tip: When you wait five years to reply to a tweet, you’re doing it wrong.

Yesterday, a tweet addressed to me using Twitter’s @Reply feature appeared in my timeline on the Twitter app on my Mac:

Tweet from GotPrint

Thanks for my interest? What interest? I’d been using GotPrint.com for several years, but didn’t recall ever using Twitter to express my interest in the company.

Fortunately, the Twitter app (and Twitter.com, for that matter) makes it easy to see the original or “parent” tweet an @Reply is in response to. When I checked, I found the following Tweet:

Parent Tweet

Note the date on that tweet: December 10, 2007. Now note the date on this post: July 6, 2013. I tweeted about the company — not even using its Twitter name — five and a half years ago.

And they replied yesterday with a canned, spammy response.

Annoyed at being spammed, I responded:

Response

Apparently, the folks at GotPrint.com think I’m an idiot. Their response a short while later offered an unlikely and lame excuse:

Lame Excuse

Follow up? Five and half years later?

It’s far more likely that GotPrint.com got its hands on a Twitter bot that ran through all the old tweets that mentioned the company by name and generated spam like the message I got. While most people would likely ignore the message — because, let’s face it, most people don’t actually read the tweets on their timeline — I didn’t.

I replied:

Reply

And then I blogged about it here.

Why is this a social networking failure? Mostly because GotPrint.com — or the individual/organization it hired to handle its social networking — misses the point of social networking: engagement.

Social networking isn’t about gathering followers and spamming them with product info. Social networking is about making your company available for a dialog with your customers and potential customers. A timely dialog. (I complained about this in another blog post years ago, but I can’t seem to find the post to link to it. Sorry!)

The companies that use social networking effectively respond promptly and appropriately to social network mentions of their companies, especially when those mentions tag the company by its Twitter (or Facebook or other social network) name. They provide additional information when requested. They link to helpful documentation to solve specific problems. They provide customer service information when its needed.

They don’t generate automated responses using bots based on key words or phrases. They don’t come up with lame excuses when they’re caught doing something stupid (like responding to a 5-1/2 year old tweet). And they certainly don’t attack other social networking users who might have something negative to say about them (as Amy’s Baking Company so famously did earlier this year).

Twitter has been around for more than seven years now. Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks have also been around for quite some time. I find it incredible that organizations are still struggling to make social networking part of their customer service and marketing efforts. It’s pretty simple; why can’t they figure it out?

As for GotPrint.com, well, I’ll likely continue using them for my print marketing needs — which, admittedly is limited these days. But it isn’t because of the tweet I received from them yesterday. It’s because their price and quality meets my needs. If anything, yesterday’s tweet is a black mark against them — the only black mark so far.

And no, I won’t follow them on Twitter. In fact, if I hear from them again, I’ll likely report them for spam.