In the recent years I have taught my friends not to send me any chain letters or those sweet presentations with cute puppies looking from the screen (not that I have anything against animals in general). But I got a question from my friend today regarding a particular chain letter. She wanted to know if it is spam or not. Or in other words, does it really make a difference if you sign it and send it to all your friends?

How to know if it is spam or not? Here are 4 main points you need to consider:

• read the content
• who is the author?
• how to contact the author?
• how signatures are collected?

The content of chain letters usually target human emotions. If you really read the content you will want to help. Even if it is only typing your name on the email and sending it to your friends. They create a reaction. Action calls are specific and easy to do. I don’t believe a chain letter will convince you to starve for one week but you might be more than willing to forward an email.

But before you sign it and send it it’s important that you check authenticity of the email. Is the company, organization or person whose name is written in it really the one who wants to raise the awareness?  It might seem so, but you will not be sure until you check the web site of a particular organization, person or cause.  But to check it you will need at least a name of the organization, email, postal address. If there is a name or postal address you can check them in google.com and if there is an email try if it’s valid and check if it belongs to the organization. Usually it won’t be @hotmaill.com, @google.com, @yahoo.com … but @”organization.org”.

The fourth point is one of the most obvious. If the signatures are collected on the web site and the chain letter contains a link to the web site of the authenticated organization you can be pretty sure you will be really signing a petition. But on the other hand if you are asked to add your name on the bottom of the email and send it to all your friends this is very likely a false signature. These emails that “require” your name usually have an instruction for the 5000th signee  - send the list to a particular (postal) address. If you think about how many names would have their duplicates, triplicates… in various lists then you can figure out this is not the most effective thing to do. Also think about all those lists that do not come to the number 5000. Are all those names then lost? And think about what if 5000th signee doesn’t send the list … are now all names lost again? Or consider this: why would the 5000th signee send it to a postal address? Emails seem to work well enough. And there are several million of printers in the USA.

So I advise you to answer only to those emails that have a link to the web site - a web site that is sure the web site of the person/organization it claims to be. And sign a petition there.

In the meanwhile I’ll go and check those 1500 people who have signed a chain letter … Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

As twitter and micro blogging are gaining popularity, some slovenian companies and political parties had decided to open twitter accounts and gather as many followers as possible. But their strategy might annoy many twitter users.

As we know many twitter users start to follow who ever follows them. So if they get an email that notifies them xzy has began to follow them they go and see who this xyz is and click on the follow button (giving a “favor” back).

So what happens if a particular company decides to follow the majority of slovenian users? They might go on the http://twittercounter.com/pages/country?time_zone=Ljubljana website and get the link to the approx. 750 slovenian users of twitter. And it’s not so hard to click on each user and start following them. So if you then calculate their success rate - by success I mean getting a follower - it can be betwen 5 and 30% - for free! And this is a fantastic conversion - just think about CTR of banners or open rate for e-newsletters - they are both much lower.

But what about the perception of those companies, brands … by the twitter users? Iwould say that this is like spam - obtrusive, rude and unwanted - at least for me personally. You can write what you think about such strategies in the comments I’ll be glad to read them.

The right way to go about is to target your existing users - people who are already interested in you, your product, brand, organization … Send a link to your twitter account in your monthly/weekly newsletter, put the link on your web site, advertize it internally, put it in the footer of your email .. Don’t just follow people. It’s feels like you want to stalk them.

But there is of course a cure for all those who want to follow you. If you don’t want to be followed by them you can block them from following you.

Block Twitter followers from following you

On the other hand, if you like or would like to stay in contact with the company … send them a twitt, ask them about their promotions, services, events … and wait for the answer. You might be surprised how long it takes to get it.

I was testing FriendCSV on Facebook (”The friendCSV app allows you to export your friends list and relevant data levels to a CSV doc that can be opened in Excel or any spreadsheet.”) and noticed that most of the people from Slovenia have their hometown set as –TOWN–, Bohinj (for example Ljubljana, Bohinj; Logatec, Bohinj, Kranj, Bohinj).

Here is an exapmle of Profile info tab where you can select your Hometown. If you choose Ljubljana, You get the following options:

And if you type Slovenia a drop down menu is populated with the largest Slovenian cities:

But they all have a strange association with two small places in Slovenia (Bohinj and Brezovica). Is Facebook presuming we all spend our vacations there? ;)

Well this is clearly a bug in their database or  ____place_for_your_suggestion___?

I like February - it is the best looking month in the year 2009.

It's nice to be a Neighbour

Yesterday I took a closer look at a billboard advertising entertainment show It’s nice to be a Neighbour. And from the distance it looked well crafted ad, however standing right next to it revealed a big mistake. I was surprized that the agency who did this was so sloppy! The dog’s pee on the floor looks totally fake (photoshoped on the ad). And why? Because they didn’t erase the pee where the wood is vertical.