spam | Social Signal

You're at a business event, meet someone, talk, and exchange business cards. A few days later, you discover they've subscribed you to their email newsletter. Is that legit... or is it spam?

Chris Brogan recently posted about his online business card... and about one of the reasons he's giving up on the paper kind: "Every time I give someone a business card, I have about a 70% chance of receiving someone else’s dumb email newsletter that I didn’t opt into receiving."

It can happen so quickly: a few misplaced tweets, an ill-considered blog post, and suddenly an organization is at the center of an online firestorm. They're called spammers and liars, and tagged with the Hashtag o' Doom, #FAIL. And the worst thing of all is they had no idea what was happening.

Where, oh where, did it all go so wrong?

Probably somewhere around the moment they decided to outsource their social media marketing.

A few days ago, we stepped out of the Social Signal offices for a little brainstorming over lunch. We'd usually do that sort of thing here - we had our walls done with whiteboard paint for exactly that reason - but a change of scenery seemed to be in order.

About 90 minutes later, we returned, only to find this on our walls: