Hello,

Recently I visited your website http://notanemployee.net;while visiting your site I noticed that you link to http://vielmetti.typepad.com at this address:http://notanemployee.net/blog/2008/05/ann-arbor-town-hall-meeting-on-coworking/. As we are closely related to them, I would love to exchange links with your website, currently there are about 5,000 – 7,000 people per day that goto my site and search for information, Therefore I would to link to an excellent site like yours.

I have taken the liberty of adding your site to my home page:

Melissa, this extract from an email you’ve sent me? This is the sort of thing that makes you not only look like an idiot personally, it ruins the reputation of your firm as well.

Maybe your name has been misappropriated by some malefactor. Maybe you’re just filled in the blanks, like the websites your email makes clear you’ve never read. Maybe you’re not even a Realtor™, but some high school student or a granny whose name was scraped just like our sites’ names were.

Doesn’t matter: indeed, I’m really talking to the useless fucking spam bot who sent the email.

Now normally spam isn’t worth commenting on, these days.

But if you think about it, this is as good an example as any why I try so hard to shoo away marketers, personal brand managers, social media gurus, and the other earnest but clueless folks whose living depends on convincing third parties they can “help” them through by leveraging social media. Folks: using social media to market a person or a product is not social.

It’s abuse. It’s going to backfire on you and your clients. It leads to crap like this.