In many ways, Facebook has lost some of its luster as a business tool. It isn’t that it’s not possible to properly market a business on the platform. It’s that the complexity of the EdgeRank algorithm mixed with the touchiness of the advertising formats has many turning autopilot onto their pages instead of investing time or money into them. They just weren’t seeing a return on investment the way that they had hoped. It seems to be an ebb and flow of sentiment. General Motors, for example, decided to dump their investment into Facebook advertising last year before returning to the platform this year….

Email spammers can reach hundreds of thousands of people in a very short amount of time before their domain is registered through the appropriate networks and filtered. Social media spam attacks can be transmitted to millions in the same amount of time and will often delete their own accounts before allowing them to be tracked by anything other than the logs. Neither of these types of spam attacks have skills that are even close to this lady. Check her out in action. Tireless. Relentless. Accurate. Self-correcting. She has all of the qualities to deliver more spam in less time than a human should…

At the World Economic Forum in 2004, Bill Gates made an interesting promise. “Two years from now, spam will be solved.” The rise of social media has had others making other predictions for years. One such prediction has been in the form of bloggers and technology experts declaring that email will be dead by 2009, then 2010, then 2011… and on… and on. Spam and email both persist. They have both improved as well. According to Litmus, email was still the most popular online activity of 2012 despite Facebook taking up the bulk of our online time. Is your business using it? Are you improving on your practices,…

If you’re going to spread your message on Twitter, it’s best to avoid the Viagra technique. That’s the message coming from capitol hill as Congressman Steve Stockman (R-TX) released evidence in a press release that he is being spammed by twitterbots. “Obama’s anti-gun campaign is a fraud,” Stockman said in the release. “Obama’s anti-gun activists are trying to defraud Congress using the same scam that sells ‘male enhancement pills.’  Every day thousands of Americans call, write and email the Capitol opposing Obama’s anti-gun schemes.  Obama’s supporters are panicking…

You may notice a drop in your Pinterest followers today. Don’t worry – your popularity level hasn’t fallen. It’s just the spammers and bots that Pinterest is targeting, so the “loss” of followers won’t really be a loss at all. In fact, Pinterest estimates that 99% of users will only lose around 10 followers. It’s the bigger accounts that are going to be hit the hardest, but they won’t suffer at all in the engagement arena. Spam and bot accounts are the types that don’t really interact with you anyway so the drop is only going to sting a little in the pride department. For those who have purchased followers…

Spam is annoying. Period. There is always a random e-mail that we receive and don’t even bother to open but just send it right to the trash. We all know spam as something that is a nuisance when it comes to e-mails. But community managers have a difficult time with it as well when it comes to their social media platforms. Many people don’t think before they type. If you consider the volume of poor texting that people do regularly on their iPhone you would know what I mean. Comments are said that shouldn’t be said and once they are posted, they are forgotten about by the user. However when it comes managing…

I hate spam. Who doesn’t? I tend to hate it more than others because a relative fell victim to phishing a couple of years ago, so I tend to actually look at phishing emails to see what’s happening in the world of Nigerian Princes and people trapped in London. This particular email struck me as oddly awesome simply because of the “Trust Factor” (an important component in the world of phishing) that they employed at the end. “This message is never sent without Google Mail Accounts Trust & Safety Authenticator.” The message was sent, therefore the Authenticator must be working in full force. The…

Pork, salt, water, sugar, and sodium hydrate. Those are the general ingredients for Hawaii’s favorite meat substitute. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective) that’s not the spam we’re talking about here. Since the opportunities on the Internet started becoming clear a decade or two ago, the rise of spam as a substitute for real content, as a unsolicited solicitation tool, and as a general annoyance with potential threats has forced many to avoid certain aspects of the internet that would normally be higher quality. Look at email. Twitter. Search engines. All of these…

If Google has AdSense, let’s just call this NonSense. A new advertising campaign for people-what-make-cars Alfo Romeo is (we desperately hope) not the future of advertising, as you’ll doubtlessly agree by watching this video. ‘There’s no getting away from an offer this good’ proclaims a motorized billboard, as it chooses unwitting pedestrians and gives chase, urging them to purchase a car. I can’t imagine this is the best way to sell cars – and obviously, this video was created with humour in mind  – but still, there’s a deeper concern here. Given the pervasion of advertising in our everyday…

When Facebook, Microsoft, and a mysterious website known as Make-My-Baby go to town, everyone wins. Everyone, that is, except for us. The company uses a fairly simple affiliate marketing technique that is not only spammy but also potentially dangerous. It lures people in via Facebook ads… a lot of them. Only AT&T and Match.com contribute more to the $1.86 billion in yearly ad revenue that Facebook receives. Once visitors arrive at the site, they are prompted to install a toolbar plugin to “present an enhanced experience” for their users. At this point, you should run away. Once installed,…