Spam marketers stick to influencers in Social Media

Spam marketers stick to influencers in Social Media

Social Media is one of strong platform for the marketers - not only for your company but for spam marketers. Sound companies and celebrities create their account in social media to expand customer base and foster engagement with them. In fact, having interactions with customers is very important to increase tight connection and stickiness with them. Although if one has created a good followership with millions of people, it becomes another stage that others can make a pitch to followers.

The picture below shows an example that a spam comment appears in a hyper influencer's post whose followers account 12 million. Those spam comments aim to get them read among the influencers' followers so that they can acquire new customers. Spams are often totally irrelevant for the post, or pushing an product targeting corresponding followers - for example, an diet supplement advertised to young female which spam is commented in well-known skinny model's posts.

*Source: Instagram, the picture was modified to keep the privacy

Social media has functions to 'report a spam' for owners of accounts and to delete improper comments, but there are no ends for reporting them. Instagram implemented a function for each post that owners can select whether allowing others to comment on the post in December 2016. It is also a way to avoid spam, but it completely dismisses an opportunity to interact with fans. In 2017, Instagram started a new blocking tool that automatically filters offensive comments and hide them, yet the function is not available for multiple languages.

Social media is open to anonymous and grants access to everyone. This is why how social media is such important platform for marketers. However, there is also an endless fight to get vicious free-riders away.

Reference: http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/29/technology/instagram-offensive-comments/index.html

Facebook Is Now Reducing the Reach of Users Who Routinely Share Fake News, Clickbait and Spam

Facebook is working to reduce to power to those who share fake news, clickbait, and spam postings that spread like wildfire, as they are designed to do. This is a great step in reducing the spread of misinformation, and also seems like a move that makes it more similar to Google with regard to quality.

Google is carefully measuring quality of websites every time an item is searched. Facebook is looking to build "quality" into posts so that its website is somewhat curated. It will be interesting to understand how this will affect companies, and whether certain companies will be penalized as "spammers". Perhaps a discipline that grows is social media optimization, similar to search engine optimization, where companies try to focus on the highest quality Facebook posts that pass Facebook's algorithms.

It's a good step for the user experience on Facebook, and it will be interesting to see the implications on digital media marketing.


Source: http://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-is-reducing-the-reach-of-users-who-routinely-share-fake-news-clickbait-and-spam/

AdWeek

World's best Spammers: and the winners are...

After deleting 2751 unopened emails from my junk folder I thought about our DM class on email marketing. I was surprised by the effectiveness of this mean of communication, which works relatively well not only with "real" offers, but also with pure spam campaigns.

I became curious about those companies whose only reason of existence is sending millions of unwanted emails. Most of these will end up straight in the junk mail box, however, a small percentage will be read and an even smaller percentage will generate a lead.
I thus looked for the best in class, the Warren Buffets of the spammers: the top 10 worst spammers.

According to the Spamhouse, a website specialized in Spam (the equivalent for spam of the WSJ or the FT), among the best 10 spammers, there are 4 American, 2 Ukranian, 2 Canadian, 1 Indian and 1 Hong Kong companies or individuals.

Here is the list of the Spammers. Whether you want to add them to your spam filter list or take them as a role model, is your call.

1)  Canadian Pharmacy - Ukraine
A long time running pharmacy spam operation. They send tens of millions of spams per day using botnet techniques. Probably based in Eastern Europe, Ukraine/Russia. Host spammed web sites on botnets and on bulletproof Chinese web hosting.

2)   Yair Shalev / Kobeni Solutions - United States
High volume snowshoe spammer from Florida, (former?) partner-in-spam of ROKSO spammer Darrin Wohl. Son-in-law of ROKSO listed spammer Dan Abramovich. Sued by FTC in 2014 due to fraud.

3)  Century Infotech - India
India based spammers-for-hire. They rent an endless number of servers to host their own spam webpages and the webpages of their spam-clients, such as the infamous "Flooring" spammers.

4) Michael Lindsay / iMedia Networks - United States
Lindsay's iMedia Networks is a full-fledged spam-hosting operation serving bulletproof hosting at high premiums to well known ROKSO-listed spammers. His customers spam via botnet zombies with spam payloads hosted offshore, tunneled back to his servers. He and the gang have been hijacking (stealing) IP address space from companies for years to spam from. Illegal in the USA. 

5) Jagger Babuin / BHSI - Canada
Romanian spammer now living in Vancouver BC. Also known as the "Dr Oz" spammer.

6) Yambo Financials - Ukraine
Huge spamhaus tied into distribution and billing for child, animal, and incest-porn, pirated software, and pharmaceuticals. Run their own merchant services (credit-card "collection" sites) set up as a fake "bank."

7) Vincent Chan gang - Hong Kong
Vincent Chan and his Chinese partners have been sending spam for years. They mainly do pharmacy, and are able to send out huge amounts daily. They use vast numbers of compromised computers -- for sending, hosting and proxy hijacking. Now seem to be an "oursourced" server obtainer for other spam gangs.

8)  First Place SEO & financial fraud spam gang - United States
Seem to be either Northern New Jersey or San Diego, California based scammers. They rent endless numbers of servers and buy endless domains to then pump out "SEO", search-engine-rankings and financial fraud scam spams.
 
9)  Dante Jimenez / Aiming Invest - United States
Spamwarez, lists, "bulletproof" hosting in the finest South Florida tradition. Working with worst cybercriminal botnet spammers.

10)  Josh Henderson or Nicholson - bulletproofvps.com - Canada
Offshore Bulletproof Hosting is his thing.


More information on:
http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/spammers/

Gmail tabbed inboxes has email marketers reeling

Personally, I love the new Gmail inboxes with the new tabs for organization. In fact, I don't know how I lived without it for so long. It auto-slots each of my emails into broad categories (Primary, Social, Promotions, etc.) This new feature has made my job of sorting through my emails much easier.

However, I came across this post the other day that describes how email marketers are scrambling to find out how to "survive" and continue to get their customers to open emails. Google's algorithm on how they are filtering the emails is very robust, but I'm sure in the coming weeks, there will be many clever programmers and marketers trying to figure out a way around it so they can make sure their emails show up in customer's Primary mailbox.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/07/how_email_marketers_can_survive_gmails_tabbed_inbox.html

Spam lives on through our best intentions...

The basics of email spam and what you can do to prevent it

Spam, also known as "Unsolicited Bulk Email" (UBE), consists of the unwanted email that we all receive in our inbox daily. It typically is promoting products or websites and sometimes even tries to trick unsuspecting recipients into passing along personal information.

While individually, spam may only impact each of us at a very minor level, collectively it becomes a major concern. Below are several statistics that help us understand the true scale of spam throughout the United States:

• As of June 2007, it is estimated that there are over 100 billion spam messages sent daily.
• According to Spamhaus, 90% of incoming email traffic in North America, Europe and Australasia is estimated to be spam.
• A survey conducted in 2004 estimated that lost productivity from spam costs Internet users in the United States $21.58 billion annually.
• The United States is the highest producer of spam (19.8% according to Sophos).
• Microsoft founder Bill Gates receives four million e-mails per year, most of them spam.

What can we do about all of this spam? For those that want to go above and beyond the Microsoft Outlook junk mail folder, there are several premium solutions available to help deter the amount of spam we receive in our inboxes.

For those with a larger budget, there is Cloudmark (http://www.cloudmark.com). This software has been around since 1998 and is one of the largest antispam firms in the world.

For those with no budget, there is a free antispam solution called MailWasher Pro (http://www.mailwasher.net/). According to the MailWasher website, the software is used by 8 million people.

No matter how much spam is traveling around the internet these days, it is important to note that with just a few preventative steps, we can drastically reduce the amount of spam we receive.

1. When registering for sites, don’t use your home or business email. Instead, set up a free email address on Yahoo or Hotmail.
2. Never click on the links in any spam messages
3. Never reply to any spam messages
4. Don’t forward chain mail messages
5. Keep your junk mail folder activated