However, this has enabled a particularly bad form of spammy spam that I encountered again this week from Shoppybag.com. It starts with a message like this one:

ShoppyBag Spam

It comes from someone you know, claims that person has “tagged you” in a photo, and asks you to sign up to come see it.

Once you get in the sign up process, you have to provide access to an address book to find existing friends – it’s not optional, but one of the required steps with no skip option. (That should, in retrospect, have been my point to shove off and avoid the site with due haste – but I went ahead, reassured by the messaging that they would never send any email on my behalf without my permission).

Then once the site finds your “friends” (anyone in your address book who is said to already be a user) it offers to connect you to them. Again, there’s no “select none” or “skip this step” – the most minimal option is the “select people already using shoppybag.com” (paraphrasing as I didn’t take a screenshot and don’t want to try this again).

The problem is that at that point, ShoppyBag is out “tagging” for you all of your “friends” and sending them the same email you got in the first place.

To all my contacts – sorry I fell for it again this am; I usually recognize the signs and bail earlier in the process than I did.

So instead, public warning: avoid signing up a shoppybag.com as they will spam your whole address book without your permission.

Kendall Square, Inbound (Photo by Eric Kilby, cc-by-sa license)

For those not from around here, in Boston the mass transit system trains run by the MBTA, and popularly called the “T,” are generally marked with inbound (going towards downtown Boston) and outbound (going away from downtown). The exception is four stations in the middle of downtown Boston, where the concept of Inbound and Outbound gets a bit tricky, since (and this is very much a Bostonian perspective) you’re already at the center of the universe, so everything is outbound.

Heart of the System (Photo by Eric Kilby, cc-by-sa license)

What does this have to do with marketing? I’m getting there.

Inbound marketing is defined in opposition to outbound marketing, most clearly in this post on the hubspot blog:

When I talk with most marketers today about how they generate leads and fill the top of their sales funnel, most say trade shows, seminar series, email blasts to purchased lists, internal cold calling, outsourced telemarketing, and advertising. I call these methods “outbound marketing” where a marketer pushes his message out far and wide hoping that it resonates with that needle in the haystack.

[. . . ]

Rather than do outbound marketing to the masses of people who are trying to block you out, I advocate doing “inbound marketing” where you help yourself “get found” by people already learning about and shopping in your industry. In order to do this, you need to set your website up like a “hub” for your industry that attracts visitors naturally through the search engines, through the blogosphere, and through the social media sites. I believe most marketers today spend 90% of their efforts on outbound marketing and 10% on inbound marketing and I advocate that those ratios flip.

While there was lots of great content at day one of the summit, it felt to me like there was a natural tension between those who still think of the job of marketing as being to spread professionally crafted messages – to shape the market by getting your brands’ story out there before or more loudly than anyone else’s – and those who have started to think of the job of marketing as being to humanize, to listen, to engage with communities.

A great example of the latter – listening to and engaging with communities in a real human voice, was Kodak’s Chief Blogger (@kodakCB), who talked about Kodak’s expanding social media programs, how they leverage content created by their customers, and their current initiative to create a “chief listener” to supplement their other efforts. Similarly, Justin Rasmussen (@thisisjustin) talked specifically about humanizing technology and many folks spoke about the need to maintain relationships and the important of human thinking (and empathy) over the importance of platforms.

At the same time, other sessions seemed overly focused on shaping, defining, and dominating the conversation through outbout techniques. This included a session on PR as a way of “getting the word out” (which focused on sending out press releases, and “social media releases,” but also noted that PR has to move away from essentially doing interruption marketing to the press on behalf of brands) and email marketing (isn’t email by definition outbound? I guess one does opt-in, but it still feels very outbound to me). The final session of the day, from Tim Street (@1timstreet) was focused on “how to make your videos viral,” and focused on spectacle, story, emotion – and the need to hire a pro to create video for you.

I really don’t mean to pick on individuals or categories – and I’ve worked with some very smart PR folks, email service providers, and video artists who totally “get” the value of listening to customers – but it felt to me like these sessions represented the outbound meme: craft professional content and push it out as a way of reinforcing your message.

While Chris Brogan‘s “Listening is the new black” was my favorite tweet, and the concept of dropping the “engine” from SEO my favorite concept, the #ims09 stream was quickly polluted by a variety of spam from the explicit and pornographic to the more subtle “we’re here at #ims09, come talk to us about our products” kind (which I think is still marginally spam – certainly “interruption marketing”). Twitter as a conversational, inbound marketing tool was being turned into an interruption based, outbound, spam engine.

It will be interesting to see the contrast between the ProjectVRM summit at the Berkman Center next week and the Inbound Marketing Summit. If Doc Searls, founder of ProjectVRM and one of the co-authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, can be said to represent former marketers who abdicated from marketing on behalf of the customer, does the Inbound Marketing Summit represent marketers who stayed in marketing but are nevertheless learning from Cluetrain how to be better marketers?

If markets are conversations, is the job of marketing to “own” and “define” that conversation by pushing out messages, or to listen to that conversation and help companies make better offerings more closely aligned to the needs of the customer?

What should the balance of “inbound” and “outbound” be in your marketing programs?

Outbound Platform (Photo by Andrés Monroy-Hernández, cc-by-sa license)

Maybe a better way to think about it is that there are good and bad ways of doing both inbound and outbound marketing. Email newsletters can be a great way to reach interested customers who’ve chosen that as their communication preference, and applying the lessons of professional storytelling (and the 100+ year history of film craft) to your company’s videos is a great way to improve their quality and potential relevance to users. At the same time, setting up “listening” channels in social media doesn’t necessarily mean a company actually plans to hear what users are saying in those channels.

Ultimately it comes down to finding the appropriate balance and sincere intent. Marketing has become humanized, and the voices of real people inside and outside the organization need to play a role in the conversation. If your intent is to dominate rather than participate, perhaps in the end it doesn’t matter whether you’re using outbound or inbound techniques to get there.

Social software is stuff that gets spammed

Well if that’s the case, now even share-my-powerpoints site SlideShare (follow me there) is officially social.

Here’s an email I got yesterday via SlideShare:

Hi jeckman,

jane209 sent you a private message on SlideShare.

******
hi I am jane,single girl looking for honest and nice person, whom I can partner with.I don’t care about your color or ethnicity.I’m sending you this beautiful mail,with a wish for much happiness. I am looking forward to hear from you. Write me on (janegab42@yahoo.com)God bless. thanks jane
******

You can reply to jane209′s message by clicking here.

Now, as much as I like the sentiment that Jane209 is looking for someone with whom she can “partner,” that she doesn’t care about my color or ethnicity, and that she wishes me much happiness, I’m going to have to go with the “report as spam” link on that one.

First, the WP-OpenID plugin for one specific version (2.2.0) had a bug which ate comments containing double quotes, which means all comments with links in them. 2.2.1 fixes the problem.

Then, Luis Villa told me in email that the Captcha on my site was unusable. So I tried it, and he’s right.

A while back I installed a plugin for Mollom, which catches comments which are thought to be suspicious in one way or another, and then asks users to solve a captcha. Problem is that they were all unsolvable.

Or, rather, they were perfectly solvable, and I solved them – as I’m sure Luis had. But Mollom refuses to recognize my solutions. Maybe I really am a computer, and thus fail the Captcha.

Anyway, the point is, I’m not trying to make it difficult to comment on this blog, just trying to deal with spam. I’ve turned Mollom off again, and won’t re-enable it until I try it myself and see that it works.

Mollom will ask “suspicious” commenters to solve a CAPTCHA before allowing their comments to post.

If this proves too onerous I will go back to just using Askimet but I wanted to try it out.

Thanks to Dries, Benjamin, et al for running Mollom and to Matthias Vandermaesen for maintaining the WP-Mollom plugin.

My favorite blog spam comment of the day (with no link so as to not encourage them, and therefore no credit):

Candy cheap folklore urged birth heroic, carpet stain removal?!

Maybe it’s the faux sentimentality of the “birth heroic” smashed up against the prosaic “carpet stain removal,” but I like this particular piece of candy cheap folklore.

Candy cheap is like really really cheap – one step below bottom-shelf-liquor-cheap.

Has anyone, ever, anywhere in the universe, actually purchased Xanax based on a blogspam comment? Or even visited the link to which the Xanax push pushes?