All day long I’ve been getting invites via Facebook from some technology firm I’ve never heard of, inviting me to join facebook so that I can connect with them. Everybody gets these types of lame attempts at “social media marketing” from desperate clueless companies (not to mention that half the time these solicitations are just spoofs, infected with something or attempts to phish your login details). In this case, the invite really was sent via Facebook’s invitation engine, and all day long they kept coming….

In fact even after the entire Z***** & Associates Facebook page had been deleted (see below), I still got another invitation after I got home from the office.

After the second or third one I started posting on their Facebook page. My first question was “Why are you emailing me? Do you realize that if we have no pre-existing relationship then it’s spam?” – my comment was deleted from their wall.

Then after another one came in, I filed an abuse complaint with their ISP. After another one came in, I went back to the Facebook page, and there was a post there saying “We apologize to anybody who received multiple copies of our invitation”. I posted a follow-up comment that finally somebody had clued in, but I still had no interest in receiving even a single unsolicited invitation from them, to which somebody actually replied saying”Obviously this was not our intent.”

I pressed the issue: “How did you get my email address in the first place?” (I use a separate domain name with wildcard email forwarding for all website opt-ins, all of these invitations were sent to my main easyDNS corporate email account). “Why are you sending invitations to people with whom you have no pre-existing relationship?” and “Do you realize that’s spam?”

The next thing that happened was this:

And using the Facebook search for “Z***** & Associates” no longer returned any internal Facebook results. In other words, either they were nuked by Facebook or they committed suicide and just removed the page themselves. I’m assuming I wasn’t the only crusty prick who got all curmudgeonly about it. But we all know that I have a long track record of despising spam in all it’s forms.

What earns these guys a post about all this is that when you go and look at their actual website, they bill themselves as:

Z***** & Associates is a successful Canadian technology consulting practice focused on helping high technology companies achieve market leadership.

Bang up job guys!

I humbly suggest that before they consult with anybody with the objective of helping them “achieve market leadership” via social media, they should pick up a copy of Scott Stratten’s UnMarketing: Stop Marketing. Start Engaging. A good fast read (or listen, if you get the audiobook like I did.) It was a good book even though I figured “most people know a lot of this stuff already….(it’s just common sense)”.

Apparently not.