Deep Spam Thoughts...Media is Free. Attention is Priceless.

Spam owns my physical mailbox, but not my digital inbox and social world.

I think about spam all the time and have been wanting to write a detailed post about my thoughts.

This tremendous slideshow that Fred Wilson posted from David Gillespie got me thinking and writing:

Digital Strangelove (or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Internet)

View more documents from David Gillespie.

Am I spamming, are my businesses spamming?

Are my kids getting spammed and with what?

My son Max is for some reason excited to get our mail. The main reason was he was waiting for his Bank of America debit card (which came late and you know the rest of that story). He reads out all the companies names and I tell him to throw them all away. He now knows JUNK MAIL.

Max was excited to get text messages on his new phone too, even though he had one friend that knew his number. He quickly discovered that the vibrating his phone was making was from spammers, but I wish I could remember what he called them the first time I asked him why he was not running anymore to his vibrating phone.

Obviously we have a spam problem in the country and it’s two fold:

1. Corporate America

2. We are Lazy

Corporate America blitzkriegs us in every battle and are blowing us away in the war. They have the money and they have the lobbyists. One recent example is Experians’s legal victory over Lifelock, preventing Lifelock from placing fraud alerts on your behalf.

As Todd Davis (CEO of Lifelock, sums it up) ‘We can now continue our mission of helping to protect consumers and their data, while Experian continues to make millions of dollars yearly by selling personal data.’

Experian’s main business is selling your personal information. They have an oligopoly with Trans Union and a few other companies and banks on the FICA credit score they created and than use it to sell your data everywhere.

I concede. You win. Congratulations corporate America. You own my mailbox. Mail IS Spam and I just throw out everything.

What’s funny about this is the government loses as I shred their mail and I shred their photo radar tockets along with the other spam in my physical mailbox.

I refuse to let them win my attention though and technology will win out.

GMail has done an outstanding job for me filtering out spam. Technology is winning.

But Technology can’t do it all, you must be active.

At Stocktwits we battle the financial spammers all the time. In my opinion it just makes our business stronger as we learn and develop our own secret sauce.

In my personal use of the social web, I am vigilant with a discovery process and filtering process. It keeps the spammers at bay. If you are not lazy, you can too.

In other words, quit complaining about spam and take action.