It’s been a while since I’ve gotten riled up by blog comment spam roaches, especially true since SpamKarma is doing a real bang up job of stopping them before they get far into my WordPress site.
But wow.’. check out Tom Coates’ PlasticBag post On Cillit Bang and a new low for marketers…, a detailed narrative of tracking down a completely inappropriate comment posting by cleaning product spambloggers to a personal story of Tom’s writing about his long lost father. I never had the stamina or drive or guts to get to the source as Tom has brilliantly done (eventually phoning the perpetrators, and daring them to respond/explain). But his words slice to the heart of my own emotion about “people” who exploit “web 2.0” – maybe it is the Read/Write/Spam Web? It is more than well worth reading…
The fake weblogs that pretend to be real are almost bad enough – it’s an attempt to muddy the reality of a community with the fantasy world that they need to flog cleaning products and make it seem glamourous or exciting. But someone out there – associated with one marketing group or another – is also keen to directly stick their dirty little hands in the cookie jars of well-meaning, honourable people. They’re quite happy to pollute or destroy the value of the enterprise for everyone else if they can derive even the tiniest return from it.
I’m going to give them the benfit of the doubt and say that this whole enterprise is based on clumsiness and stupidity rather than evil, but we have to make a stand and make it clear to these people that if you live by the sword you die by the sword. It’s not good enough for just these marketing people to realise that they’ve screwed up and damaged the brands they were associated with – we have to keep making examples of them to stop other clumsy organisations viewing our self-created territories as nothing more than sales opportunities. Do not lie to us because we will expose you. Be honourable, or we will erase you. And all anyone will see when they search on Google for your products is that there is no depth to which you will not stoop to get another few bottles into someone’s shopping basket.
(emphasis added). Wow. Them’s good strong words. And it also says do not be just a silent victim of this sort of action, point it out, publicize abusers, hang them out in the light for others to see.
So if spamvertising is your business, take some time on what glorious stories you will tell your grandchildren about how you made the world a better place, or you contributed to some greater good, or even led an honorable life by sticking your spamroach tentacles into those innocent cookie jars. That is a puny life indeed.
