So I received a request from Carlene on MSN (which I rarely use - except to talk to Indian programmers) and accepted it because it looked harmless enough.  I thought it might actually be a real person at first because there were delays between Carlenes messages.  I recently saw a post about this in my either inbox or Google RSS reader.  Anyone else seeing a spike in MSN Chat bot marketing?  I knew this worked years ago in Yahoo message boards, but I have rearely seen this happen outside of Skype, never MSN Live.

The video above is from Youtube director CasimirN and he discusses spam and how prevalent it has become in society today. CasimirN also has another interesting film on the differences between Television and Internet Video:

I’m posting this not only because the above videos are entertaining, but because I want to demonstrate what social media is. By linking to this Youtuber’s channel I am increasing his view count, his potential subscribers, and thus potential website visitors (if he has a website). This is how SEO ultimately works and how you can gain natural online social media - by producing great content and having others promote it for you; naturally of course.

So I received this rather benign email that seemed like it may have been an actual friend.  I explored the email because I wanted to see what loser friend of mine was actually using Classmates.com and not Facebook or even MySpace; yeah MySpace is so lame now.  So I thought it would be funny to find out what loser is using Classmates.com  Instead I was sent to this fantastic website:

I was surprised that some email spam marketer would do a bait and switch so hard; they aren’t even related!  Nonetheless, I assume this spam marketer is actually making money from this - otherwise I don’t I would have received it.  Perhaps it was a marketing ROI test, but I assume he is actually making affiliate revenue from this.  We have never promoted adult websites through affiliate marketing, but spam is certainly one of the only ways to go in this industry.

I think this gives Classmates.com an excellent opportunity to sue the company putting this affiliate offer out there.  The company putting out the affiliate offer may or may not know their offer is being spammed, but even if they did I doubt they care.  Affiliate companies turn a blind eye to spam, and that’s a truth, no matter what anyone tells you.