The Not-So-Fine Line Between Promotion And Spam

I'm not the flagging kind of person, but sometimes I wish I was. If only I was a big, untouchable whale with 100k SP, I would flag the hell out of all those spammy promo messages...

^Soure

Promoting Your Business

I've been in marketing long enough to know that promoting your business is important. You need to get the word out about your service in order to get clients. I don't have a problem with that.

But I always assumed people were aware of the fact that there is a difference between getting the word out, and just plain spam.

Promoting your business means targeting users that might have an interest in your service - potential clients, so to speak. Leaving your promotional message on everyone's posts, without bothering whether those people have ever shown any interest is not advertising, it's spam.

There's a big chance I'm not going to make myself very popular by writing this post, but I'll let you in on a secret: I stopped caring about popularity a while ago. If we want to save SteemIt and make it a better place, trying to become popular isn't the way to go. Addressing the problems is. (Not that I expect things will change because I'm addressing them, but at least I'll get rid of some of my frustration.)

Everywhere I Go

Not so very long ago, I bumped into one comment from @partiko after another. Don't get me wrong, I love what @partiko is doing for the platform, they're doing a great job helping out new users and I can only applaud that. But apparently they missed the entire idea of promotion versus spam.

I thought they had stopped, since it had been a while since I had seen one of their comments, but a quick glance at their comment feed shows me they haven't.

Now, at least they give an upvote to the posts they leave their copy/paste comment on.

If someone from @partiko reads this: I'm not trying to bring you guys down. I want you to succeed. I'm just not sure this is the way to go to get the word out about your service. Personally, I was so sick and tired of seeing that same message on my posts over and over again, I simply stopped using the app. I'm sure that is not your intention, and all I want to do is make you aware of the fact that there should be other ways to promote your services, without leaving those annoying comments over and over again.

But now I'm not receiving the @partiko messages anymore, there's a new kid in town. No matter where I go, I bump into those @steem-bet comments. I'm pretty sure you've seen them around, because they are all over the place.

As you can see, I flagged it - my first flag in months. But I'm not willing to spend my precious VP on flagging a bot. Lol, I even commented on a couple of their comments, but talking to a bot is like talking to a brick wall - you can't expect it to reply.

I have never shown any interest in betting. I never visited Magic Dice or any other betting apps that are available on the Steem blockchain. I'm pretty sure that goes for a lot of you.

So I wonder what they are trying to achieve by targeting people that will probably never visit their site. The more of their comments I see, the less I feel like visiting.

Promoting your service to a targeted audience... that I would understand. If you left a comment on a post written by @fullcoverbetting (I'm sorry, Peter, for using you as an example. But as your username and post content implies, there's a chance that you might be interested in joining their site) that would count as TARGETED advertising.

Every marketer knows that it is useless to try to sell garden tools to someone who doesn't have a garden. And the more you push them, the smaller the chance they will actually buy.

Just like for @partiko, I do want @steem-bet to be able to make their business a success. The more successful projects we have here, the better it is for the Steem blockchain.

But again, I don't think the way you're trying to achieve name fame is the right way to go.

It could just as well be only me who is extremely annoyed by these messages, but to be honest, I doubt it.

There are more than enough things on here that need some work before we can expect that the Steem blockchain will be taken seriously by the 'outside world'. We definitely don't need that kind of spam that only makes things worse.

But that's just my two cents...

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