MySpace Spammers Upgrading Their ToolKits
Here is an email message I received in MySpace today from an Adult Dating Site that I will not privilege with a link. It was from a profile with the name Heather and no pic of who’s only friend was Tom. If you are in MySpace ever, you know the profile.
Hey Schultzie
How’s it goin? Im Heather and I just moved to the DURHAM area and I wanna meet a nice guy around here :-). I moved here to DURHAM a couple of weeks ago for work and now that I’m here I have nobody to hang out with! I read your profile… You’re cute and I liked what you had to say :-).
I’m just graduated college and I’m lookin for a guy who is a little bit older or more mature than me. You say you’re 28 and you’re cute so I guess you’re qualified
My friend Kim from back home suggested I tried using myspace to meet people in my area. I just signed up and my profile sux hehe. I do have a I put up a dating page at
My dating profile - more pictures (Link to sign up page on adult dating site)
… I have alot of photos and stuff up if you wanna see me. My user name is “summerfun2″. Its free to sign up.
I left you a personal msg on my homepage and I took a new pic for you today. Come check me out when you have a chance, k?
Lookin forward to seeyin ya,
Heather
So… I am impressed.
Not by her casual use of LOL, that she thinks I’m cute (though I am) or that she seems to be promiscuously bubbly with a screen name like “summerfun”. It’s the fact that whatever affiliate is running this latest spam campaign is actually using some smarts rather then just brute force that intrigues me.
First off, lets move past the fact that spam sucks and everyone hates it and try to focus on the marketing opportunity presented.
As far as MySpace spam goes, this was by far the most personal. They mined my readily available profile information to create a message that spoke to my age, name, and location. Now, they didn’t seem to care that I was married or that I had a kid. I guess on adult dating sites, all bets are off.
So why am I writing about spam. Mainly because in my opinion, the difference between using these tactics in a spammy way compared to using them to drive a targeted, community driven, value added social media campaign is fairly thin.
IMHO, If you can create a highly targeted, personalized and valuable message to the people in a community, you can go from spam to direct marketing fairly quickly.
For instance, if I had the tool being used above, and I had a poster website, I would scrape the top movies and top favorite bands on a profile and offer everyone who added my profile to their top friends a free (your fav movie or band here) poster when they spend $??.?? on my site or if they also sign up for my newsletter.
This could be especially successful for indie bands who may not have that much schtuff available in mainstream outlets.
Of course we would include their name and other creepily personal information.
