Hello,

Recently I vis­ited your web­site http://​notanem​ployee​.net;while vis­it­ing your site I noticed that you link to http://​viel​metti​.type​pad​.com at this address:http://​notanem​ployee​.net/​b​l​o​g​/​2​0​0​8​/​0​5​/​a​n​n​-​a​r​b​o​r​-​t​o​w​n​-​h​a​l​l​-​m​e​e​t​i​n​g​-​o​n​-​c​o​w​o​r​k​i​ng/. 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.