You're Doing it Wrong!

The other day I compared the two presidential candidate’s logos. The post got a bit of traction from Copyranter and Discourse.net. In my analysis of McCain's logo was this passage: Then, he adorns the star with what could be considered wings, reminding us that he was a pilot, a pilot who graduated fifth to last in his class at Annapolis, not usually a place from which the Navy selects its flight school candidates.

That's all the geniuses at AviationSchools needed.

"Ah-ha! Someone is talking about flight school! Time to paste a random, stupid comment on that blog and send them to my random, stupid link farm for aviation schools!"

The comment, if you can even call it that, left TWICE, reads: "Online Aviation Training Directory has one of the largest selections of flight schools and aviation training schools online. New flight schools and aviation resources added weekly."

The commenter, posting under the name "Flying Lessons," is also the proud owner of PlanetMace, your one stop shop for pepper-spray and stun-guns.

This is social media, friends. Or this is what it's becoming. This guy finds "flight school" in a post about John McCain's logo and assumes my readers want to visit his stupid link farm for aviation schools. Even if no one ever goes to that site through the comments of the original post, at the least his stupid link farm now has an inbound link from my site and countless others, surely, where he has pasted his URL in a very irrelevant way.

This is not a "conversation." This is SPAM. It's maddening and it's doomed to fail.

If you are going to use blogs as a place to get the word out about your business, it will require real thought— actual words from your head typed relevantly to the post— in relevant places.

Quit being carnival barkers and midway hawkers. You're ruining it for everyone else. You're also not helping your business.