Chris Spagnuolo’s EdgeHopper

Last week, my local public radio station (KCFR) was holding its annual pledge drive. I love NPR and local public radio and always give to support it. But, it’s kind of annoying when they spend an entire week asking for pledges, making me feel guilty if I don’t give, and worst of all, providing just about zero value for the entire week. That’s right, in the usual 12 hours of listening that I do each week, it turned out that the local station asked for pledges about 90% of that time and provided programming that was valuable to me only about 10% of the time. So yes, I tuned out.    

Now, I completely understand, this is public radio and this is how they get their funding. They have to operate this way. But you are not public radio and you don’t have to operate this way. So why is it that so many companies and organizations spend so much time asking for your money, your time, and your commitment and focus so little on providing value in return? Constantly selling to me and constantly asking me to help you makes me tune you out. You’re just part of the static.

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Well, it’s official now, Facebook usernames are live and doing well. In a wild frenzy to grab their custom vanity URL’s, Facebook users created over 200,000 custom user names in the first 3 minutes of Saturday morning (and yup, I was one them too). After 15 minutes, Facebook reported over 500,000 new user names. One of the highlights of the night was Benjamin Standefer snagging Ashton Kutscher’s aplusk moniker (http://www.facebook.com/aplusk). Guess we’ll be seeing Ben on some news shows tomorrow!

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OK, maybe this is going to sound cranky, and I’ve talked about it before, but if you’re on Twitter I’m begging you to please, please, please stop sending out bad automatic direct messages to everyone who follows you. I’ve already followed you, and now we’re following each other and I really, sincerely appreciate the fact that you’ve followed me too. But that doesn’t mean you have to send me an auto DM selling whatever it is you’re selling. Quite frankly, it gets lost in the clutter of all the other people trying to sell me things on Twitter. I just end up ignoring them. They’re insincere and they don’t do either of us any good. I’m not going to buy your stuff and I’m more than likely to filter you out in the future. So, if you’re not sure what exactly bad DM’s look like and you want to be safe, don’t send out Tweets like these gems (I’ve withheld user names to protect the not-so-innocent):

“Consolidate your debts and grab your copy of the Sexy Twitter Secrets at www.bz9.com/debtconsolidationunsecured” (Sexy Twitter secrets? Really, hmm, I’ll have to head over there immediately!)

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How many emails have you received that start this way: “Hello, My name is Van Curtis. I work as an international auditor for the Delta Lloyd Bank (ALM) Asset Liability Managerial department monitoring five branches including Singapore, Belgium and Netherlands. I have taken pains to find your contact through personal endeavors which I may explain to you upon your response. A possible family member of yours (name withheld for security reason) died nine months ago leaving behind an investment total of EU5.95M (Five Million Nine hundred and Fifty Thousand Euros) with my bank.” I looked through my spam folder today and found tons of these. But, we all know these are spam and we don’t think about reading too far if we even open these types of messages. (Although I love to think that I’m suddenly five-million dollars richer!)

I also get lots of emails with subject lines like “Time to Sleep Well” or “Succeed in a BIG Way”. And wow, to my surprise, when I opened these they were ads for, you guessed it, Viagra and Cialis that looked like this:

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