There’s an old saying… “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me!”
So a few days ago I got several matching comments posted on my blog and I thought it was from an IT firm asking a solid question…
The comments were all over my blog and I thought the guy or gal was desperately seeking the best answer in the upcoming days before the end of the year to make a decision. We actually got folks giving some good advice. So tonight I get another series of emails that are all way way too familiar:
[THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS “DIVA”] – What is the best IT automation tool out there?
Date: 23 Dec 2009 21:05:57 -0600
From: MSMVPS.COM – Automated Email <postmaster@msmvps.com>
To: sbradcpa@pacbell.net
A Comment has been posted to THE OFFICIAL BLOG OF THE SBS “DIVA”: Can you do Direct Access with SBS 2008? by INEPLERERY:
Can anyone recommend the best Remote Management & Monitoring program for a small IT service company like mine? Does anyone use Kaseya.com or GFI.com? How do they compare to these guys I found recently: <a href=”http://www.n-able.com”> N-able N-central it consulting
</a>? What is your best take in cost vs performance among those three? I need a good advice please… Thanks in advance!
——————————————————————————–
This Comment was Not Published (Spam Score: 0).
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This time I take the time to follow the “poster” link when I follow it makes me realize that I’ve been fooled.
Badly.
Embarrassingly so.
So to all of those who posted on that thread I apologize as well.
I’ve been scammed. The poster hitting my blog with these comments asking for the ‘best IT tool” or the “best patch management tool” is http://a5web.com/.
What is http://a5web.com/?
With over 200 clients all on top 10 of Google, Yahoo, MSN and countless local search engines, rest assured that our white-hat SEO techniques are PROVEN, are transparent and really work. Read our testimonials to find out more about the search engine optimization results we have provided our clients with.
It’s the death of social media indeed when you trick bloggers or use spam links to ‘up’ your google/bing ranking.
Dear vendors: Here’s a novel thought to getting more customers:
BUILD A BETTER PRODUCT THAT PEOPLE USE.
Trust me. If you build something I LIKE you don’t have to pay me, you don’t have to bribe me, you don’t have to do anything but get out of my way and let me gush all over and talk about it. I’m an insane person who likes to talk about things that I like doing or that I’m interested in.
See my Mini Cooper? I like love my car. No one from Mini Cooper USA or BMW pays me to bake Mini Cooper shaped gingerbread cookies and blog about it, I just insanely gush like this because I like the product. Conversely why do I blog so much about SBS? Microsoft doesn’t pay me. I just use the product in my business and I use the blog as a journal of the tweaks and stuff that I do. The customization that I’ve done to make Remote Web Workplace have our firm logo, the fact that I’ve got SBS 2008 humming nicely, it makes me feel good to know that my migration was such that no one on the inside suffered any downtime. The folks on the outside remoting in they were very impressed with the new landing page and like that Outlook Web Access is much faster than the old platform.
The virtualzation platform that I picked is also a really really REALLY cool way to deploy SBS 2008 and the VERY cool thing about SBS 2008 versus SBS 2003 in the virtualization space is that it’s 100% supported on HyperV. Unlike SBS 2003 which due to Exchange is not.
But seriously, I’m this insane to just blog about this geeky stuff that makes me gush all the time.
But don’t you DARE try to trick us me and use Search Engine Optimization techniques and spamming blog sites to get your product up in the search engine.
Shame on me for falling for it…hook… line and blog spam.
As an internet marketer, this type of activity gives us all a bad rap. Id argue that their behavior is NOT white hat and its borderline unethical and Ill do my part to shame them. One response tip you may want to consider; remove their redirect url from your post (and blog) b/c its giving them the inbound link credit (juice) they so desperately seek.
And Im only going to add my light note that all vendors mentioned are solid in their ability to automate daily sys admin tasks, but as with all solutions, evaluate each closely [disclosure: I work for Kaseya].
Susan,
I get those come into my blog and did a check on them also before letting them come through onto the blog itself. Its sad that others want to trick us like that.
As with all other practices though, be safe with checking the site. I usually will google the site itself and see what my WOT add-on rates the site in the google list before actually going to it, especially with the drive by downloads out there.
Mike