If you remember in the late 90′s it was a race to the bottom with land lines, free nights and weekend with $0.10/min then $0.05 a minute then they finally stopped playing games and now pretty much all our local telcos give us unlimited nationwide calls for a flat monthly fee along with a boatload of additional features: Caller ID, voice mail, call waiting, etc.

The cell phone companies are doing the same another race to the bottom with calling circles, and rollover minutes. What a waste of everyone’s energy.

Have you seen the new Straight Talk service? $45/mo prepaid unlimited everything courtesy of Tracfone and Wal-Mart. Sure the phones aren’t all that advanced but they just added a full keyboarded phone to the line up, I’m sure we’ll see more advanced phones down the line.

This tells me that if the company can charge you $45 with no long term commitment and they are still pulling a profit from it, there is no reason for these other companies to be charging upwards of $70 with a long term commitment most of it must be pure profit for these guys.

Aside from the  number crunching side of marketing ie how to best use advertising dollars to reach the most people all marketing is superficial. Tune into any late night informerical and you got people basically telling you buy our product and you life will be so much better, they often sell the illusion that X product will make your life perfect. People being people are always chasing perfection in one way, shape, or form.

You have Chef Tony sawing through a hammer with his ‘Ginsu’ knives. Really is any one in their right mind going to try and saw through a hardened steel hammer with their kitchen knives? Then you have Ron Propiel assuring you that his showtime rotisserie will save you money, make your food taste better, and be healthier. He doesn’t tell you that you’ll probably buy it, use it once or twice, and then add it to the collection of junk appliances under your sink, like your popcorn maker from the 80s that you never use.

Moving on to shorter commercials; You’ve got the ‘he went to Jared’ commercials and the ‘every kiss begins with kay’ jewelers commercials both of which assure you that your lady will be so enamored that you thought enough of her to buy her some diamonds that you’ve got a 110% chance of getting laid the night you give her the gift.

All examples above are not marketing but advertising. Advertising and marketing as so intertwined that they’re often hard to tell apart. I define advertising as making someone aware of a specific product. Marketing takes many forms there’s personal marketing, for example making yourself appealing to potential employers or mates. There is brand marketing that is just making you aware of the brand or maintaining awareness of the brand like Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart frequently do. There is product marketing which often collides with advertising by marketing the product to a specific group of people by playing on perceptions. For instance Chef Tony’s knives market to value savvy women by adding pieces to the set piece by piece and stating an inflated ‘retail value’ to sell on the perception of value. How can you not buy this set of knives for $49.99 when it’s really worth over $300? Kay and Jared market to men on the perception that diamonds are a girl’s best friend and will instantly make her melt in your hand. Dude get a hooker, it’s cheaper then diamonds.

I’ve always thought marketers must see the world through different eyes than regular Joe’s; They seem to see the world as how can I manipulate something to make it seem better than it actually is or have qualities that it does not. That doesn’t make them bad people the world would probably be pretty boring if everything were still sold in brown boxes and brown bags with out all the fancy colors and caricatures. I wonder if people actually bought based on need rather then what some savvy marketer tells them that they need would the economy be in such bad shape right now? Would people be in so much debit? That’s the bad side of marketing when your so good that you convince people to buy stuff they don’t need.

However most spammers aren’t business men. We have come to think of them as scum of the earth. The main reason we think of spammers as scum of the earth is because they use other people’s hard work for their own gain. Look at sblogs (spam blogs) who often scrape others blogs and then ping the blog back vying for a track back in the blog’s comments they stole content from. I see these all the time in my wordpress spam. Most bloggers spend time writing and researching posts and along comes a spammer to copy the posts word for word and then try and get a link from the original poster.

Forum spammers come in four varieties:

1. Some register and post a bunch of spam right off the bat; this is the easiest to combat for moderators simply delete the posts, ban the user, and IP.
2. Others register and masquerade as a regular member, often posting decent content and after a while start dropping their own links in posts. These are the hardest to manage because in some respects they do contribute arguably good content but the link spam is a problem. Who knows where those links are going to wind up going in the future. Is your average member going to be tricked into clicking the link and winding up in some kind of trouble?
3. Post Padders/Sig Spammers: These are especially prevalent on webmaster’s forums that limit signature links to members with more than X posts. A new member will sign up and post a slew of one liners in order to get up the number of posts required to have a signature then 1 of 2 things will happen either they will create a signature and never come back again or will stay there posting nothing useful just to increase the number of times their signature is shown. Post padders do nothing but waste your member base’s time by having them read through the drivel. Forum admins are split over this some will let it go on because it inflates their member and post numbers thus makes them seem busier and gets them better advertising rates other like myself are more strict and delete the posts then warn the member.
4. Cookie Stuffers: Also prevalent on webmasters forums. The spammer will embed a 1×1 transparent image that puts a cookie on the users computer. Most often cookie stuffing is done with eBay and hosting companies with affiliate programs that depend on user’s cookies to credit the affiliates account with a percentage of the sale. Cookie stuffers are really hard to spot and often the only way to catch them is by viewing the posts in plain text some how. When I see a post padder on a vB forum I always search for more posts by that user the search results page shows a snippet of each post in plain text. If the spammer is lazy and stupid, as most are the image shows in image tags right in the beginning of the post.

Search Engine Spammers are simple they try and game the search engine to display their spam blog, made for adsense site, or affiliate site first in the listings. Search engine spammers are for the search engines to deal with and there isn’t much decent webmaster’s can do about it.

Now for something that’s going to probably get me a lot of nasty emails: What’s the difference between a spammer and internet marketer? Not much. Decent marketers don’t cookie stuff of course but decent hardworking internet marketers are what keep the internet going they spend money to make money by hiring other people to work for them with site development, graphics, and copy writing. Pay for ad campaigns, buy domains, and usually have information on their site in addition to plugs for products. Without internet marketers the internet would probably be a very boring dull place. If any thing all marketers add a certain spice to things.