Tag Archives: spam

Crappiest Corporate Holiday eMail Contest: Holiday Spam

Holiday spam time! I’m holding a contest to see who can identify the crappiest holiday e-mail greeting! Can you top these three? It shouldn’t be hard. And you get extra points if you uncover a really bad corporate eGreeting that’s trying to mimic a viral video and does so awkwardly. After all, we’re a video blog here… which means occasionally we talk about video.

Some winning criteria for the WillVideoForFood “Crappiest Corporate eMail Greeting of 2010” award:  a) use the online medium for form over function, b) lack taste and humor, especially if it tries anyway, c) is unpersonalized, d) is self serving, e) it accidentally politically incorrect, f) is obviously providing the least effort possible.

Here are my the three leaders so far. Please put yours in the link, or e-mail me if that’s better. NOTE: remove any codes after & or specific numbers/letters… thus the penny-pinching gifter won’t know who “outed” them. Except in my case I guess.

1) CLIP FART: The anonymous company that sent an e-mail with this ass-face clipart picture. I asked the sales rep if his retarded son drew it, and he said yes… and the son aspired to be a viral video maker. I told him to turn up the retardometer. I’m convinced Tommy (not his real name) just didn’t know how to turn off the auto-greeter via his sales force automation software.

2) MIDI-OGRE This InVivo website a corporate friend sent me because a) you have to download software, and b) while you’re downloading (what is probably spyware) an annoying midi loops. I somehow have two sessions open, and the song is in a weird infinite echo that’s like Santa on acid. I can’t even find the open browser windows and it’s making me insane.

3) CHARIT-INABILITY Thirdly (and I won’t share this for obvious reasons) was the corporate eGreeting that invited me to click on one of three charities. I clicked on one, refreshed and clicked another. So maybe they’re not even tracking (or donating), or else I just tripled their donation and tomorrow may decide to bankrupt them.

What do you have? Special points if it’s a horrible viral-video holiday eGreeting… but it has to be from a company. And go for a stupid-ass pun name like my three to cheese it up even more.

Cheesy Gif I Just Got Reminding Us" Jesus Is the Reason for the Season."

THIS JUST IN 12/21: TheDoctorsChannel’s Sonny and Cher pet parody.

Social-Media Monitoring Problem: Dredging Up Ancient Garbage

I’ve grown increasingly frustrated with social-media monitoring tools, and their inability to filter out old content or spam bots using my old content. It’s very easy for me to assess a social-media tool by querying my own name (Nalts). I know instantly what content about me is new, and can recognize old content that has been repurposed by spam sites, which often grab my old blogs and video descriptions to fool search engines and people into thinking they’re not autobots.

Here’s an example from my Google Alerts, which I am about to discontinue. None of this is new! Even Google can’t determine what’s old anymore... and some of this links to my own blog posts that are ancient. This makes me question the prevailing myth that Google will overtake the social-media monitoring landscape with its own free solution.

Is there a solution? Even the best social-media tools can’t seem to discern between legitimate recent posts (of me anyway) that are on my sites or others.