What Spammers Know That We Don't

We are all working like mad to develop location based services and technologies. Phones that know where the nearest cool coffee shop is, discount coupons that apply to a store you just snubbed and walked past.  I believe it is considered to be a multi-billion dollar opportunity and the salvation of the mobile industry.

But frankly, we are sucking eggs and doing next to nothing while a few key individuals are proving you can mine for location based gold today with free or near-free resources.

Spammers Innovating Faster than Hi Tech:

The Real Estate, Online Pharmacies and Porn Spammers have once again proven they are leaders in adapting new technologies to their annoying purposes.

I tweeted the following:

And within minutes I received a follow from KatyFStewart.

She offers one link on her page.  To this site:

 

Should I be promoting her Twitter account?  Should I have clicked through on a link from a semi-naked nubile photo?  No.  Of course not.  But will I be alone?  Nope.  Guaranteed.  Not only that, I would bet that many a media person would cry to get even 1/10 of the clickthrough and conversion rates these people are achieving.

Not Just Porn:

Tweet the name of a city and you will undoubtedly get a sudden increase in followers.  Why?  Because the real estate industry is not about to be left behind by the porn industry.  Quite a few real estate agents appear to be using auto-subscribe services to add you as a friend in cities they do their work in.

These are services that listen for a set of keywords and once it finds a match with any twitter user in the world, it sends that person a follow request on your behalf.

Let me be clear. I hate auto-subscribe services.  It's like paying someone to get you more friends.

That said, it does make me wonder.  Do we really need fancy and expensive GPS and high tech solutions or could we just better monitor and respond to the contextual content people are providing in their tweets and status updates?

Brilliance:

What I love about [what] Ms. Stewart is doing (real name likely Amanda Hogsbottom) is that they are using simple, free and contextual tools to mine twitter and facebook.  Then they are doing simple (and free) IP sniffing from their website to provide an end to end contextually relevant and highly personalized (location based) solution.  Something the big brands are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve with likely far less success.

Comments

[Alan Wolk]

Similar experience this week: tweeted about a beach vacation, got not one, but 7 identical Twitter Spam messages from the same realtor, using variations on the same account.

Just did a post about how location based tweeting/four-squaring is going to be a boon to spammers everywhere, so this post of yours is particularly relevant.

[Sean Howard]

Thanks Alan!

It's funny, I made a comment/joke about having a "panic attack" in a tweet and I suddenly got messages from only pharmacies selling drugs that help against such things. oy...

[Dirk]

Tweeted on Friday evening about the International Space Station heading over South Africa. Minutes later I had about 50 inappropriate follows. Was it because I tweeted on a Friday evening - the spot who is lonely bot? Perhaps it was the abbreviation I used (ISS). Who knows? I’m starting to think Twitter should implement a new follow policy/process. No small feat.

[Sean Howard]

Hi Dirk,

I hear you! I'm amazed at all the auto follow activity I appear to be getting that seems to be immediately related to a tweet I've made.

Interesting. The automating of follows. Is there a way to control this via the API's?

I'm reminded of an AMAZING talk from the Long Now Foundation by Daniel Suarez. He spoke of ways to control bots but it required a complete overhaul of the Internet and Augmented Reality. No small feat indeed! ;)

[Sean Howard]

http://blog.longnow.org/2008/08/19/daniel-suarez-daemon-bot-mediated-reality/

[blaiq]

You'll be amazed at the click rate porn spam gets :

http://statosphere.misentropy.com/2009/02/theres-56-clickrate-on-porn-spam.html

[Andrew Robinson]

What I don't understand is why brands aren't searching out these conversations and engaging people. If spammers and big pharma can pick up keywords, why can't other brands look for mentions of their brand name and then just start chatting to these people? Even just a "great to see you enjoyed our service" would be a massive leap forward for some companies. And it's so simple. Maybe it's too simple - that's why it's not being used. People prefer complicated solutions because they think that work has to be hard!