Inspired by a great piece of spam this morning. This looks like a lengthy and individually crafted posting, offering a summary of what looks like the current situation on H1N1 in the USA. The problems? Well, it is targeting a US dentist, and the spam was contributed to an article about how Google has been tracking H1N1 and speculating about why the UK stats weren’t present. It’s just not relevant, and it’s been dropped by someone plugging a business – see Google’s take on comment spam.
Have a look:
Dentist Lake Worth
http:// www. dentallakeworth. com | randomizewee@gmail.com | 122.53.68.2Symptoms of swine flu are similar to most influenza infections: fever (100F or greater), cough, nasal secretions, fatigue, and headache, with fatigue being reported in most infected individuals. Some patients also get nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. In Mexico, many of the patients are young adults, which made some investigators speculate that a strong immune response may cause some collateral tissue damage. Some patients develop severe respiratory symptoms and need respiratory support (such as a ventilator to breathe for the patient). Patients can get pneumonia (bacterial secondary infection) if the viral infection persists, and some can develop seizures. Death often occurs from secondary bacterial infection of the lungs; appropriate antibiotics need to be used in these patients. The usual mortality (death) rate for typical influenza A is about 0.1%, while the 1918 “Spanish flu†epidemic had an estimated mortality rate ranging from 2%-20%. Swine flu in Mexico (as of April 2009) has had about 160 deaths and about 2,500 confirmed cases, which would correspond to a mortality rate of about 6%, but these initial data have been revised and the mortality rate currently in Mexico is estimated to be much lower. By June 2009, the virus had reached 74 different countries on every continent except Antarctica, and by September 2009, the virus had been reported in most countries in the world. Fortunately, the mortality rate as of October 2009 has been low but higher than for the conventional flu (average conventional flu mortality rate is about 36,000 per year; projected novel H1N1 flu mortality rate is 90,000 per year in the U.S. as determined by the president’s advisory committee).
From Google h1n1 (Swine Flu) tracking in the UK, 2010/02/05 at 6:49 AM
So, what makes this spam, rather than a valued contribution?
- It is not from a person, but from a targeted keyword
- The supplied URL is appropriate to the keyword
- The topic is appropriate to an element of the article, but not the meaning
- The author is in the Philippines – not itself a definite marker, but contributes to the likelihood – but is wildly unlikely to be the targeted dentist
- The submitter has identified the article based on search results, not on the content – that is, a previous search lead to finding the article, but the article was not read and understood and an appropriate response composed. Instead a well crafted and rare piece of text was composed and submitted – but was irrelevant to the thread
- It has nothing to do with the relatively rare topic of dentistry; barely discussed online. Whereas Swine Flu gets a lot of high interest coverage… if you were targeting spam, you’d want high ranking, frequently searched topics.
Google’s search results show the signs of this specific craftwork in many blogs, where the indications of spamminess have been overlooked. Some of the comments left by this spammer are even on-topic and thread-relevant.
You could consider this the dark side of creating frictionless interfaces. OTOH, amongst the more sophisticated SEO spammers, there’s software that signs up for places like PC World (creates fake email address registrants, completes the forms with fictitious data, submits the forms, reaps the emails and authenticates, and then adds spammy comments). Creating friction to exclude spammers can decrease interaction with real users – there is a balance of evil to strike; how much near spam will you let through, in order to make sure that you can engage with the right audience?
This is a moderately clever piece of spam – it evaded Akismet, for example. If I’d been writing about the US situation, then I might even have let the spam through, as a useful contribution to the thread.
Is it entirely evil, like some of the spam submitted here? No. But this is almost good enough to pass as a valid commentary in a social forum. If you spam, then that’s the kind of area you need to be in, to make it through to trusted forums. Serious, unique content that contributes to the dialogue. Good effort, but only an ‘F’ – you were busted on relevance!
This article is part of series of short meditations on social marketing and customer interaction, following on from yesterdays “Google. Foot. Gun. Shoot.” and the previous article about soft paywalls “PC World – Online Subscriptions”
