Spam a lot.

This morning, I checked my email and thought that the GMail spam filter had failed me for the first time ever.

I know, the horror.

In my inbox, there was an email with the subject line:

Your manliness will be measured by the size of your important love parts.

Usually, I’d just trash any of those messages about penis enlargement that happen to seep into my inbox. For some odd reason — perhaps because the message seemed to have come from a friend of mine’s address — I decided to open this one. Inside, the message read:

And by love parts, I mean your heart and soul. What did you think I meant, you sicko?

That made me chuckle, but also made me smile to remember that some people still think that manliness is determined by love and caring.

Thanks for making me smile Melissa.

And thank you to GMail for not sending that message to my spam folder. I should never have doubted you.

Twitter account for sale, and other bad ideas

Andrew Baron’s decision to sell his Twitter account has caused quite the stir. And while I’m not quite sure if this is an elaborate hoax or a calculated PR stunt, I do know one thing:

It’s a very bad idea.

Buying a pre-packaged community is a bad idea, clearly, but selling your audience is just as bad. I know this because it has been done before.

Selling your soul

This whole situation reminds me of the companies and marketing firms that buy lists of email addresses in order to send their messages to a large (but, I’d argue, disinterested and unengaged) crowd.

The practice of buying email lists demonstrates a blatant laziness and lack of true customer care from the company purchasing the list: instead of taking the time to create conversations and engage with the community, they instead decide to effectively spam people who have not signed up to interact with them in the first place.

Undoubtedly, this leads to negative feelings toward the company or marketing firm, and — at least this is true in my case — an immediate ignoring of all messages they may send, even if they are pertinent to my current situation. This also leads to a distrust and dismay towards the people that sold the address as well. They lose credibility, and most importantly, loyalty.

When you buy tickets to a Prince concert, you don’t want to see David Hasselhoff on stage just because The Purple One got a chunk of cash to give up his audience. That’s bad news in the end for both Prince and the ‘Hoff.

Communities are not for sale, and people that think that they can sell an engaged audience are setting themselves up not only for disappointment, but derision as well.

Saving grace

Andrew’s not being shady and selling your engagement behind your back. He’s being open about it, and people have the option to leave the community if they wish. (Which makes me wonder all the more about his motives for doing this in the first place.) He may be spared the backlash because of his openness.

Let’s hope, for Andrew’s sake, that he is. He’s a really nice guy.

But I still think that if Andrew really wanted to make a bit of cash from Twitter, the better option would be for people to pay him to tweet (with complete transparency) about products and services. That way he wouldn’t be compromising his community.

Right now, he’s selling you and me for a quick buck. Not only does that reflect poorly on him, but it’s just a bad idea that’ll never work.