Spammers got ya down? We all know the pain of putting a form on our website only to have hundreds of spam-bots find it - ruining our morning with useless submissions. Spam wastes our time and creates an unnecessary hassle.

Last Thursday (October 28), Facebook quietly put into effect its new spam filter for Facebook Pages. It is a relatively small feature with only a handful of actions left up to the user; however, if you are a community manager and deal with a Facebook page for a company or small business, not being aware of the changes could cost you fans, therefore costing you revenue.

Maintaining and marketing the LevelTen website comes with it's positives and negatives.

Big positive: we get tons of traffic.

Big negative: we get tons of spam.

Excuse me if this comes off as a rant, but hopefully it will come off as no more of a rant than Derek Powazek's offensive and narrow-minded post, "Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists" (do a Google search, I feel no need to give this post a link).

"SEO is poisoning the web"

Here at LevelTen Design, we have a monthly newsletter that we send out, but we have had trouble with it going to spam folders. Even though the LevelTen In-Site Newsletter passed all the spam filter tests for three different spam checkers, it is still getting dropped in Gmail and Outlook 2007 spam folders.

A recently popular sales training book called No More Cold Calling™, by Joanne Black, has reopened the idea of sales without cold calling. As eluded by the title, the book offers tips and alternatives to avoid being that no name person calling and asking for someone’s business without some type of connection.

I imagine blog owners feel the same way about receiving new comments with links from strangers as business owners on the receiving end of a cold call. I call them cold comments. Below are some similarities between cold calling & cold commenting.