SixApart Spamming Bloggers to Promote Blogs.com

First of all, let me state some things clear right in the very beginning: I believe SixApart develops one of the best blogging platforms on Earth and I also think reviving Blogs.com as a blogs directory less than a month ago was not a bad idea – the site looks pretty good and I definitely see people spending some time to discover new blogs suggested by Blogs.com editors here. And now I will have to say that I object to the latest marketing technique SixApart uses to promote Blogs.com because it really looks like spamming the entire blogosphere – and SixApart is not the company I’d expect to be involved in this type of marketing.

Today I have found an email in my inbox (sent to “undisclosed recipients, by the way, so I can only guess what email they used and if it is a mass mailing actually) with the subject reading “You’re a featured blogger on Blogs.com!”.

Generally I simply ignore such messages because they invariably offer either to link back to their directory from a post stating how honored I am or give them some free real estate on Profy for a widget announcing that I earned some 9.9 out of 10 points for the blog quality. Well, thank you, I am honored and all – but not enough to actually sacrifice some screen space here.

But this one I felt I actually had to read because, after all:

1. It was from SixApart
2. It was about a recently hyped Blogs.com
3. My LinkedIn toolbar showed the sender’s position with the company as a “Marketing Manager”

So it all looked trustworthy enough to read – and this is probably why my disappointment after reading is so deep. So here is the actual text (without the signature):

Dear Blogger,

We wanted to let you know that your blog is featured as one of the best blogs on Blogs.com.

Blogs.com is a new site from Six Apart that collects the best blogs and posts from around the web. The blogs featured on Blogs.com are chosen by our editors and the community for their quality, popularity, and the relevancy of posts. Our goal is to simply help bloggers find more readers – and to help readers find great blogs.

You can let people know you’re featured on Blogs.com with a customized Featured Blogger badge. Just follow these steps to add the badge to your site:

http://blogs.com/badging.html

To find your blog on the site, use the search box to search for words from your most recent posts. We update hourly so new posts are always being added to the overall homepage and category homepages.

Need help? Just ask: editor@blogs.com

For more information on Blogs.com or to see other featured blogs, go to http://www.blogs.com/.

We also welcome your feedback. If you have any comments or questions (or would like your site removed) please let us know at editor@blogs.com.

So you can see basically all the worst expectations are here: I am offered to install a widget on Profy to tell the world Profy is featured on Blogs.com (tell me if you are interested and I will reconsider) and I am even offered to search for some words from my recent posts to find where exactly Profy is featured (I have done a search for “profy” and for my name and only found other blogs quoting me so I still have no idea where exactly Profy is featured and have no intention of searching for all the recent keywords). I’m afraid that the featured position in yet another blogs directory (even if it is one from SixApart) is hardly a reason enough for me to spend an hour over there looking for possible links back to Profy, really.

I have been offered to install various widgets on Profy numerous times – for people to easier subscribe to our feed with someone’s RSS reader (one of them I was particularly flattered about had a subject line that read “Partnership between Profy and XYZ”, where XYZ is a very well-known name in the feed reading niche, by the way) or for people to see the high quality of our posts as assessed by some experts over there. Once I even received an invitation to register with some social bookmarking site (sorry, I don’t remember the name now) and add their button under our posts because someone (presumably the site owner) bookmarked one of our posts on their site (that one was also accompanied by a long lecture on social bookmarking as a concept and how useful it may be in driving traffic to our blog) so I was supposed to help the site get visibility to send traffic my way.

Well, yes, I do have all types of experiences with people pitching their widgets to me for them to get some Google juice. I am sure other bloggers receive tons of such emails as well and we may have gotten too accustomed to them to even notice. But I don’t want a respected company like SixApart to engage in such questionable activities that probably involve mass mailing since I don’t see my email or name anywhere and have no idea what database they used to extract my email.

I know that after this post I will hardly ever have Profy appear on the Blogs.com as a featured blog or as anything else again in the future. But for now I feel that I will survive without it (at least I have not noticed any hits to Profy from Blogs.com because of the mentioned “featured” position) and maybe it will make some companies think again before choosing some new peculiar promotion method – after all, bloggers are known to publish everything that aggravates them right to their blogs.

UPDATE: Mass mailing confirmed by some bloggers reporting receipt of the same email repeatedly (see the comments below). 

Fill disclosure: Profy also offers a blogging platform to participants of private beta testing.