—-—-—-- Forwarded message —-—-—--
From: Federated Media
Date: Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 9:05 AM
Subject: A Holiday Gift from FM, $5 CPM's
To: melissa@melissagira.com

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Cheers and Happy Holidays,
Federated Media

FM Self-Serve Homepage
Online Marketing Idea Exchange

Can you spot the one that doesn't belong?

This much is easy to understand: Sending 100 friends a link to your company's site is spam by any reasonable person's definition, whether you think it's "efficient" or not. Facebook has to crack down on such behavior because its users are getting sick of a surfeit of irrelevant messages, whether they're from friends or advertisers. Web security firm Cloudmark says 37 percent of Facebook users have noticed an uptick in spam over the past six months. What's more, Facebook is dealing with an increasing barrage of worms, viruses, phishing scams, as well as security threats for which researchers haven't invented suitably scary jargon yet.

Marshal's analysis: The response rates to spam — especially if you only count the messages that don't get filtered — are higher than most people presume, and that's why spammers keep at it. My take: People who buy from spam are much more likely to take surveys. (Photo by cursedthing)

Roger W. Neal, senior vice president and general manager of BusinessWeek Digital, said that as Business Exchange pages work their way up through search engine results, the site should double BusinessWeek’s traffic on the Web within two years, allowing it to sell more ads.

There you have it, bluntly, from a senior BusinessWeek executive: Business Exchange is a search-engine spam trap, meant to capture Google users on their way to actual information. What makes the plan brilliant: In the short term, ad salespeople will sell these pages at BusinessWeek.com rates, raking in a fortune on throwaway content. In the long term, though, BusinessWeek risks turning all of its online inventory into junk by association.

(Photo by Chester Higgins/The New York Times)

"Follow spam" is what happens when a Twitter user sets up an automated script to subscribe to thousands of individual users' feeds, found by crawling Twitter's pages. Follow-spammers aren't interested in reading all those people's updates. They're actually hoping their new pretend-friends will follow them back in exchange, creating an opt-in list for their messages. These may be marketing, or just personal drama.

It seems like a victimless crime, but there are two problems caused by comment spam:

• 1. Each user gets a notice whenever a comment spammer starts following them. If you're getting Twitter on your cellphone, it means frequent interruption by annoying "TotalStranger is now following you on Twitter" text messages. If you don't have an unlimited messaging plan, the messages cost you as much as 15 cents each.
• 2. Williams's servers are already overloaded. "In extreme cases," he writes, "these automated accounts have followed so many people they've threatened the performance of the entire system."

That's it. I know, hardly a crisis. White people need something to be uptight about, and Ev Williams has delivered. I give it another three months before there's a service mag called Twitterer at my local Borders.

(Photo by AP/Euler)

He would earn a fee from an unnamed third-party company based out of Houston based on the number of emails he sent out. In the years that he was active, between 2003 and 2006, the DOJ claims he had over $3.5 million deposited into his bank accounts. Davidson plead guilty to falsifying header information to send spam; tax evasion; and criminal forfeiture. He'd been sentenced to spend 21 months in the minimum-security prison, as well as ordered to pay $714,139 in restitution. Happy with the payback?

[Reuters]

I am the owner of ten Facebook profiles. Every single one of my profiles has at minimum 200 friends. I have aggregated the friends for each persona organically. I will briefly mention the manner in which I compiled a list of genuine friends for each persona.



Step 1: Develop a persona with an intense interest on specific subjects/topics
Step 2: Integrate that individual into communities/forums based on their interests
Step 3: Stimulate conversation inside communities/forums and interact with other users
Step 4: Establish the persona inside the communities/forums
Step 5: Begin to add friends organically



The ten profiles I have are as follows, and can be sold separately if requested:

• Samantha (age 19) – loves music, makes art, and enjoys the outdoors
• John (age 35) – health purist, into yoga, active runner, amateur cyclists, and into healthy eating.
• David (age 23) – Computer programmer, big gamer, into the latest gadgets, and is a blogger
• Michael (age 42) – Intellectual, reads books, enjoys poetry, has a weakness for fast food, and loves his two kids
• Carrie (age 26) – Fashionista, craves gossip magazines, doodles potential outfits, and follows celebrity developments
• Erik (age 29) – Big beer drinker, watches a ton of sports, likes sports cars, and likes to cook
• Holly (age 18) – Big into volunteering, loves reading, loves school, and interested in travelling abroad
• Peter (age 19) – Athlete, big into college life, likes drama and mystery movies, and can’t live without mac and cheese
• Shannon (age 33) – Design aficionado, into exploring a city’s culture, active artist, and
  is latched onto her iPhone
• Kristin (age 40) – Live at home mom, loves cooking for her family, wishes she had a new car, wants a vacation to the beach, and is really into gardening

These personas are geographically dispersed, and they all live in major cities across the United States. I am leaving the last name of the profiles absent, as not to be identifiable by Facebook employees. I am not providing a screenshot of the profiles either, but they are available if a serious request is made.



All of these Facebook personas engage on a daily basis with other Facebook members, they share content, and they update their status. They have a variety of applications installed on their Facebook page, and they have a substantial amount of comments left on their wall. Additionally, these personas post pictures they find interesting on their Facebook page.



I currently am testing the waters, and would like to see if any marketers are interested in using these. Under the right conditions and for a fair price you will receive full control of these personas, as well as associated emails. A walk through each of the characters is possible if an individual is serious about their interest, and is willing to assign a value to the persona ahead of time.



I would love to hear from you. Please contact me at: pseudopr@gmail.com for questions

Its benefits aren't limited to just one service! Check out how those looking for a "MySpace Friend Bot" can find and purchase what they're looking for with these same Google tools.

Nope. At least according to one Stickam user, Dan Hendricks, who Twitters:

okay, how the hell are these stickam bots getting my email?? all the sudden i'm getting all these spam messages. bye bye stickam account.

I got an email from pbwiki even though I wasn't signed up for any kind of a mailing list or anything, so I emailed them about it. They only had my email address because it was the content in a wiki hosted with pb wiki and they dodged the question and just talked more about the content of the email. They're definitely helping themselves to all the data in their user's business wikis,

Likely because of the rumored privilege afforded to it by Google's search algorithm. Blogger blogs appear on the blogspot.com domain, which has high rank in search results, and Google makes it easy to run profitable AdSense text links on the site. That adds up to easy money.Researchers aren't clear if spammers have managed to compromise captchas through automation or simply by employing cheap labor, but if the latter, then even KittenAuth won't be able to stem the tide of spam blogs gaming keywords for clickfraud riches. Your move, Google.

• Skip over spam. Spammers pushing phone sex, camgirls, and penis pills are among the earliest adopters of every new social network. If their "friends" are few, or have similarly sketchy biographies, the supposed "girl you can meet tonight!" is probably a scam, too. Most friends have at least some friends in common. If few of her friends have added her back, or if their profiles are mostly empty, move on.
• Sift through a pro's network Porn performers and fetish models still use MySpace for legal professional networking. So who else networks with — or at the very least, parties with — people who make a living getting naked? That's right: prostitutes. Not every hardcore actress can be had privately for the right price, but maybe someone in her Top 8 can.
• Check her references. No one but the rankest amateur relies solely on MySpace for clients. Run her name through a few escort review sites, like TER and Big Doggie, to cross-check. If you don't turn up any search results on those sites, there's always Craigslist.

(Photo: Tatum Reed, from her MySpace profile)

It would be silly to just delete this account I have here, especially if there is someone out there that had like interests and had something to say or wanted to get involved in some relevant conversations.

No, it's to leverage Twitter's potential as a generator of links which increase websites' ranking in Google's search results. The good news for heavy Twitter users is that this sets the price of followers at around a dollar each. Maybe following every single account that adds you, spammer or otherwise, isn't such a bad idea after all. The only reason top Twitter user Jason Calacanis isn't selling his account? He's already using it for spam that promotes his business. (Photo by Dummycast.com's JA Donnelly)

According to Google's translation tools, it reads: "We are pleased Smart Net company to offer you our services in the design, development and hosting sites." Sure, I'm not interested in buying any of those things, but I'm glad there's a market to be reached where the buyers and the sellers of such Web services both write in Arabic.

It helps me remember that the most popular Facebook group in the Saudi Arabian network is "Single and Looking in Saudi Arabia" and that merchants like those who resold AMD's products have fostered an entrepreneurial class in Dubai which promises to make the emirate less oil dependent and more progressive than its neighbors.

The saving grace of Intelius's new directory? It's mostly useless. My boss tried to use it to ID the guy responsible for TheFunded.com, before Adeo Ressi outed himself in the pages of Wired. (Photo by freezelight)

This, after the company's membership rose from 200 to 5,000 to 70,000 in a week, due mainly to a feature that allowed new users to invite their LinkedIn network to the site. LinkedIn has since closed NotchUp's access to its members and is even considering legal action, but really, the damage has already been done.

"We've had a number of inquiries from some of the best firms on Sand Hill Road," Ambras said. "I guess some of those people got some invites." Mission accomplished! More proof that spam pays.

Readers would have to be naive to believe that everyone from Gawker Media, (the publisher of Valleywag) and Weblogs Inc. to Wired and BusinessWeek aren't madly submitting every story to the likes of Digg and relying on the entire employee pool to solicit coverage at blogs and other news outlets. There's no shame in relying on the Web's tools to gain a competitive edge. It's just pathetic that the Times isn't confident enough to do its own Digging.

Click to expand the email.

To eliminate spam, Kirsch founded Abaca earlier this year. Now Abaca claims it can filter 99 percent of all spam by profiling spam email recipients rather than spam emails. If that rate of success is accurate, Abaca is more effective than six leading spam blockers.

Kirsch's second priority is helping a green-friendly candidate get elected. A former Republican, Kirsch worries humans might be extinct in 90 years if something isn't done. A generous worry, considering his own projected lifespan.

As for cancer, Kirsch told the Times he's taking it on like he would any engineering challenge. "This is harder on my wife than it is on me," he said "I just look at it as a problem. Here's a problem and you have four years to solve it or you don't get to solve any more problems."