Welcome to the many faces of spam series by Tom, the hater of all things spam.

Today’s spam series revolves around a rather sinister form of spam (not that there are any non-sinister forms), Walking Spam.  Walking spam is the guy selling framed artwork in your office building that feels the need to walk into your office and then proceed to check with EVERY ONE of your employees to see if they happen to be in the market for a Bob Marley or Velvet Elvis framed piece of art.

Then there is John the Job Seeker. John walks in asking where he can find the actual suite he is supposed to be in for his big interview, and then just kind of asks if  we happen to be hiring. John just so happens to have a resume handy and has actually seen a web site before, so clearly he is qualified to build web sites. Job Seeker Spam.

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I was speaking with a prospect this afternoon, everything was going along just fine, I was asking questions, he was answering, we were have a grand ole time. UNTIL…. He asked me if I know how to send out 10 million emails monthly soliciting business to an un-targeted email list. Wow. He went on to say he knows someone who can set up the spam cycle on multiple servers with multiple addresses at free email account type places. WOW. I couldn’t believe me ears, here was the best part…. He exclaimed to me “I have quite a background in marketing and this mass emailing, faxing and telemarketing is just a numbers game….” 

I can’t believe I actually heard all of this. My ears are still burning.  Seriously? Send out 10 million emails a month and cross your fingers you get one poor bored oblivious sap to fill out your contact form? AND then, there is the ‘can you close this lead’ dilemma.  

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One of my biggest pet peeves (yes, there are many…) are broadcast faxers.  Broadcast faxes are stupid.  Plain and simple.  I get solicited for health care (which I don’t think my employees would appreciate if I started picking health care plans based on un-solicited faxes), accounting services, toner ink refills (even though they are WASTING my toner by faxing me), but the fax I received today took the cake and the putz of the week award. 

Here is the title: GET PAID FOR FAXES! By filling out a simple form including my contact name, my business name, address, email address, etc., I can get paid $0.50 per EACH fax that I receive and submit back to the Get Paid For Faxes folks.  As with EVERY get rich quick scheme, there are rules, including, the fax you submit cannot be a stock or investment fax which happens to be 90% of the faxes I get.  It’s all very structured and looks so legit on that faxed sheet of paper.

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I got a phone call from one of our vendors today, a vendor that we do quite a bit of business with in the domain name registration game… They called to thank me for being such a valuable client to them and to introduce me to their internet marketing products.  I of course informed her that we are an internet marketing firm and we really didn’t need their help with internet marketing products.  She was not understanding me…. She asked then if we ‘sub’ our internet marketing or SEO work out… Nope. All in house, it’s what we do, all day, everyday. 

Here’s the point to the rant: If I am indeed such a valuable client to you, perhaps you should get to know our company a bit better and offer me enchanced domain name registration features, etc. 

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Got a phone call tonight from 806-576-0589 and heard an amateur recording about my Google listing. This company represented itself as ‘Google’ and asked me to hit 1 to verify my Google local business listing.  I of course did a bit of homework as I was on the phone and stumbled upon this brilliant tidbit explaining other people’s experiences with these folks.

Any SEO company that needs to telemarket businesses that are on the Do Not Call Registry, especially to another SEO company shouldn’t be in business!

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Got this garbage email today and thought I would share: Note the bold portion below ……

Hi,

I came across your website and was wondering if you would consider a link exchange with me. In return for just one link from you I am willing to place a link to your site on our PR5 site here: http://www.LINKREMOVEDONPURPOSE.com (PR5). I can put your link in the perfect category to match your site. We can manually set your link to make sure it always appears on that page and it will never drop off.

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