Social media monitoring – a scam alert
The lastest call centre scam/craze of the moment seems to be social media.
If like us you are being bombarded by telephone calls from companies selling 20 thousand social media bookmarks, or social media campaign management or social media monitoring packages then you’ll understand. They’re as annoying as those vuvuzelas every body’s complaining about that are ruining the world cup.
So what should you be on the lookout for?
Basically, if they do manage to get through your switchboard or past your receptionist then listen for the buzz of people in the background – it’s a sure sign of a call centre.
Social media bookmarking offers
The typical first lines will be
“would you like 20,000 social bookmarks to sites like Digg, technorati”
“we guarantee to get you on the front page of Googele with our social media packages”
Getting social media bookmarks and links in vast quatities like this means spamming the social media sites and this is frowned upon both by the social media websites and search engines.
The methods used to get thousands of such links involves automiatic submissions programmes that submit under false accounts. The accounts themselves may have been generated automaically or have been created by people slave labour call centres in 3rd world countries.
Social media monitoring offers
Whilst these aren’t scams we’d strongly advise wasting any money purchasing such tools and offers. We’ve had numerous calls in the past few weeks from companies selling social media monitoring packages. There are numerous free packages that do the job every bit as good as some of these “branded” packages.
Have you been called by the latest scammers? If so we’d love to hear your story.
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