The Email Wars

No matter what the next NEW idea is it only takes a short time until the clowns of the internet think of how to pollute it. I share with you one of my personal favorite tools, Twitter, and how the hucksters are quickly finding out that there is an audience there and that they have a chance at pulling the same scams as they have in all other online medias. It amazes me to see how these guys pop up as soon as a new idea gains some traction. Think about how it hurt email, myspace, facebook, RSS, IM and more.

These people pray on the uneducated online and in the end end up doing damage to the real people, marketers and companies trying to create a good experience. But are they the only ones to blame? Not exactly. Sometimes the technologies themselves are not able to act fast enough to head them off as they should. You would think that we would have all learned by know what to look out for and how to spot them and kill them off. But alas we are slaves to repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

Take a look at these examples I saw this past week:

This one actually uses the brand marks of trusted news sources to try to give it some credibility:

And then these banners flooding the web now. Really don’t people see these and realize if it sounds too good to be true, it most likely is.

But as I said not only are these people guilty of it, but the new HTML email layout of Twitter follower alerts are just a guilty as they are being gamed by those using it to build in trust by using the system itself to grow followers and exposure. I would wager that many people simply place trust into these emails since they come with the brand/site themselves. Aren’t these just another way to spam? And isn’t the site just as responsible for polluting our inbox with these messages as they would be perceived if it was a stand alone email message? I think so.

1. I noted in the creative above that they are actually exposing our contact details in the From line. Odd huh?

2/3. We used to all think that the “!” was a bad thing to use in a subject line but they use them over and over again. Like it is EXCITING?

4. Just look at the follower to update to following ratio and make a good decision. Maybe this simple idea is something that Twitter should look at when they allow people to have an account?

In the end it is really up to us as users to focus on making things work. We cannot rely on the technology which is sad.