Savvy B2B Marketing

For any of you out there who blog yourselves, you probably know what a pain it is to weed through SPAM comments and delete them on a regular basis. The Savvy blog recently fell victim to two separate attacks from the same website. Each time the SPAMmer left over 300 comments on our blog. And since we are nice and trusting people we don’t modify comments before they are posted, we had to take down the comments section while the six of us spent an hour or so each manually deleting the annoying, erroneous, and – did I say ANNOYING “comments.” I am not going to mention the offender, mostly because I don’t want to legitimize them, or give them an inbound link, which is what I suspect they were after in the first place.

But the latest attack did get me thinking. Start-ups and small companies often embrace guerilla marketing tactics to gain exposure for their brands. Wikipedia defines guerilla marketing as:

“an unconventional system of promotions that relies on time, energy and imagination rather than a big marketing budget…The objective of guerrilla marketing is to create a unique, engaging and thought-provoking concept to generate buzz, and consequently turn viral.”

So I can see, in a way, that some misguided “marketer” may see blog SPAMming, email SPAM, link farming, and article loading as a clever, inexpensive way to get their company in front of a lot of viewers. And sadly, it must work sometimes; otherwise questionable companies wouldn’t hire out third-world contractors to manually add their links into the comment sections on totally random blogs.

The only thing I can say is that, as a legitimate marketer, build your brand, use some creative marketing techniques to promote yourself, and listen to your gut when you are tempted to try out a new ploy that might be obtrusive and annoying to the recipients.

Anyone want to rant about a bad SPAM incident? Share your horror stories in the comments section.