The Social Media Marketing & Communications guide for Natural Health and Wellness insiders.

Confessions of a (former) Spammer

"Whaaat... you didn't like my email?"

My name is Justice Marshall and I was a spammer.

I didn’t mean to do it. I just didn’t know better. (For the record – I wasn’t one of THOSE spammers. I didn’t pretend to be a Russian businessman with a once in a lifetime opportunity or a bored hottie looking to chat with strangers.)

My intentions were good. I had a product I believed in and I wanted the world to know about it. My mistake was that I didn’t understand the nature of online communications. I thought that “leveraging” the internet meant that I could simply send my message to lots of people quickly, easily and cheaply. Luckily, a colleague set me straight early on before I could do much damage to my reputation.

The technical definition of spam relates to email and can be found here:
http://www.spamhaus.org/definition.html

Spam is putting people on your mailing list without permission or recourse. But it’s also when you misuse permission or get it under false pretense. If you promise a “newsletter” then send out a series of pitches, that’s spam in my books.

And spam isn’t just for email (or the internet for that matter) anymore. All communication can potentially be spammy.

Twitter Spam: Gift in Disguise

A Gift... For You!

We all hate spam. Which is why it’s such a big opportunity when it shows up in your DM inbox on Twitter.

People don’t usually mean to send it. They’ve just unwisely given account access to an unscrupulous third party (spammer) application.

Twitter spam generally starts as a phishing ploy.

Trends change, but messages usually look something like this: