The Rise of Social Spam

7 09 2009

I received my second piece of spam from LinkedIn today and dissected the features of new spamming practices on social networks. How can I tell it’s social spam?

  1. I don’t know Gina.
  2. Gina has a whole 5 connections and is the member of 1 group. This is very likely a fake account.
  3. Gina has no reason to think I care about social media (my profile isn’t geared to social media particularly).
  4. There is only 1 actionable item, clicking on the web site.  (Check out the site, it’s a good spam venue.)
  5. I checked out the name placed on the “forward”  - also a fake account.
  6. There is no webinar link or presentation.

riseofsocialspam

And who really would buy this line? . “Yes, you can forward this to a few people, howver, please do not blast it to your whole network” If I were their social spam editor, I would have told them this was overkill.

There is an entry for Social Spam on Wikipedia. I just slightly modified it (mostly for lack of time to be thorough).








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