Marketing 1.0 – The total of activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including advertising, shipping, storing, and selling.

Marketing 2.0 – Tricking end users into spamming their contact list via unsolicited emails prompted by little more than using your web service.

Last week was filled with social networks that have chosen to forgo the traditional marketing tactic of showing users your unique value proposition and have instead turned to the tried and true fall back of the failed entrepreneur, spamming the heck out of the internet. The two companies that have perfected this fine art are Rapleaf and Quechup.

Since this is Community Blogging Sunday, lets tour the internet and hear some stories from the front line.

Rapleaf

Judi Sohn kicks it off,

How much spam do you read a day? Only people who sell Viagra and penny stocks care about buying email addresses. Now marketers (who aren’t automatically “evil”) want to target their efforts towards people who may actually listen. They want profiles in a nice and neat package, and Rapleaf and similar companies are figuring out ways of getting these marketers what they want.

Patrick Ruffini sounds off,

It didn’t take long for the dark side of this to emerge. In the past week, Quechup and Rapleaf (the folks behind Upscoop) have been smacked down hard for spamming the addresses unsuspectingly uploaded by their users. What was supposed to be a convenience for the end user, enabling them to quietly check up on their friends’ social networking profiles, has instead become a conduit for spam, with hundreds receiving bogus “invitation” or “you have been searched for” emails as a result of a single upload.

Auren of Rapleaf throws himself on his sword,

We send emails to people after they are searched on Rapleaf.com. We send the emails every Monday night if they were searched the week before. We do this because we want to give the person who is searched on Rapleaf the opportunity to manage their information and privacy and to give them the opportunity to opt out or to change something (such as not displaying their age). Since we gather this information on people, it is important to let them know about it.

Last week we also made a decision to send the “you’ve been searched” emails to people that were searched for in Upscoop, a service we run that allows you to upload all your friends and find out what social networks they are on. In retrospect, this was really stupid and very wrong for doing this without any controls. Very very wrong. But at the time, it seemed like a really good idea for some reason. The problem is many people who use Upscoop were unaware that their contacts would receive a courtesy email.

Finally, I weigh in –

I have received at least two of these emails and found the first one mildly interesting and the second terribly annoying. Let me explain. I have always thrown around the idea of ‘prompting’ users to sign up for services like these. You know, send out a friendly reminder like “you have been indexed, come by to see how.” What has always stopped me from recommending this course of action is the exact problem that Rapleaf ran into.

If you let any system send out unsolicited emails, it will quickly spin wildly out of control. Rapleaf may survive this little escapade, only because of Auren’s quick response to the firestorm. Whether their actual business stands up to the light of scrutiny is another story entirely.

Quechup

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a clear upside to Quechup’s story. This “Anti-Social” network has raised the ire of quite a few wo have recently received email messages from their friends soliciting them to join. The problem, however, is that these friends had no idea that loading Quechup would cause their entire contact list to be spammed.

From Richard MacManus

Clearly Quechup has broken the golden rule of social networks and abused the trust of their users. Quechup’s tagline is “the social networking platform sweeping the globe” – however it seems to be doing that via an email spam campaign.

Guillaume isn’t happy that he was tricked,

The disaster of Quechup, you will have guessed, was the result in my trying various social network places. I did check the option to view my Gmail contacts but this was to see who already had an account with them. I never told Quechup to invite anyone. I insist: NEVER. Therefore, it is quite obvious that Quechup saved my Gmail username and password to use them without my consent. Well, obviously I changed my Gmail password and close my Quechup account. I guess I’ll probably report the service to the proprer authority and get this right.

Web 2.0 Roundup

So what is the secret to not getting tricked by scammers like these? The answer is that when wondering Web 2.0, be wary. Everyone is out to pick up a few new eyeballs, and sometimes business ethics are not necessarily high on the list of ways to get them. I know that I often say all press is good press, but I am pretty sure that this is the exception that proves the rule.

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