Rogers Media All-Thumbs in Spamming "The Canadian Social Media Report"

Our team and followers of our series on Social Media, a review of social media marketing competency among select Canadian industries, are disappointed to learn Rogers Mobile Group has spammed The Social Media Report.

Our ongoing series has garnered thousands of reviews and opinions from our growing pool of followers, everyone from general interest audiences, social media professionals to the cited top teclo tech teams, Rogers included.

The Rogers team has distinguished itself again, once more demonstrating their incomplete understanding of social media fundamentals. As well, their spamming activities disrespect the basic principles of social media as a vehicle for the free exchange of ideas and opinions.

Here's what happened.

Rogers Mobile Group contacted us through one of our blog posts in an attempt to clarify or suggest we missed a few points. At first we assumed this was a benign overture, offering their view of how their social media marketing efforts have benefited the company or perhaps pointing out an oversight in our research. That turned out not to be the case.

Here's the initial Rogers post to our blog, demonstrating lack of understanding social media basics.

Hi,
This is Chris from Rogers' social media team. I came across your report and had some information to share about Rogers' social media presence. To set the record straight, we've been actively engaging with our customers in social media channels for some time now. Some examples of the work we're doing in social media:
We have an exceptionally successful blog, called RedBoard http://redboard.rogers.com/, to which we have been posting regularly since earlier this year.
We recently launched RedBoard Biz http://redboardbiz.rogers.com/ for our small and medium sized business customers.
We manage several Facebook pages, including the popular Rogers Canada page http://www.facebook.com/rogerscanada.
Our team is also very active on Twitter . We can be found @RogersHelps to learn from our customers and help where we can, @RogersBuzz sharing information about news, special offers, and updates, and at our own individual Twitter accounts – mine is @Rogers_Chris.

We also have YouTube channels http://www.youtube.com/rogerscommsinc and http://www.youtube.com/rogerscanada.
Recently, we launched our Community Forums, in English http://communityforums.rogers.com/t5/community/categorypage/category-id/EnglishCommunity?profile.language=en and French http://communityforums.rogers.com/t5/community/categorypage/category-id/FrenchCommunity?profile.language=fr, where we're dealing with our customers technical issues.

If you're interested in learning more about how Rogers is engaging online in order to learn from and better serve our customers, don't hesitate to contact me.

I looked at some of Rogers posts on the sites they suggested, and using the exact title from their posts, searched in Google to see the results. Keywords that would be suggested by analytics are not used, Canada, Rogers Mobile, etc, etc, etc. Instead, Rogers chose stealth titles to mislead users to their content, a.k.a. spamming.

Next, there was another breach discovered. What followed was Rogers posting their above-quoted message onto some of our posts as comments. They did this as a means to generate traffic and promote their own corporate merchandise. Comments are that, I would have assumed any professional organization would have started with please contact us to discuss your opinions. No they Rogers just marched along across our social media network posting this spammo-mercial

Here's a word of warning about spamming methods. There are ads or links on your profile pages, blogs, forums or guest books. Beware of innocent looking blog comments such as "Great post. Keep up the good work." The commenter is only looking for the link back to his site, which most blogs (including ours) do provide.

Here is what I sent back to Rogers on behalf of the Social Media Report

Chris:
Thank you for your comments of directives to other sites maintained by Rogers.
In developing the series of articles we set a criteria from which to evaluate each site and or sites.
For a month we tracked each Telco Company, followed traffic, demographics, complaints, links, sites etc. This was not the work of those without knowledge.
The point which many on our other 860 Blogs and Social Network found was the following, which we did not post about Rogers.
I will share with you.
1. Complaints about Rogers; the largest amount of traffic in postings and the net overall. If you use link: or site: or other triggers in search engines you will determine our findings accurate.
2. Content was about specials and not a lot of fresh product news. Tell me why I should consider Rogers, not the same old news as your competition. Better product news great search engine placement.
3. Basic web rules missed, your blog using Wordpress Red Rogers is not verified with the three search engines. Overall structure of the blog is not highly developed for search engines.
4. Twitter and Facebook are only doorways into Social Media with a larger design your companies impact would out way your competition. Social Media as you are well aware has layers of applications not just Facebook and Twitter.
5. Site Traffic very low compared to your competition. Your customers are leaving your sites and head back to Google to search for Internet or cell service again. Mostly from Ontario and Toronto due to Population.
6. Your home site or Portal was not driving customer traffic or connecting customers with your social media sites. When we did find a link Errors using different web browsers. We tested 6 different web browsers.
7. 31 % of Virgin Mobile daily traffic is directly related to their web site placement of links to social media applications. Rogers traffic unable to measure.
8. The Forums do not self-sense the language of the visitor. No Search engine or Meta tags.

I hope this clears up the fact that this was not the work of a social Blogger.
While Social Media may be considered new in Canada, we are not new in social media.

Social Media is a marketing forum deserving and requiring respect. That the Net is full of spammers is not news to anyone. As well, Rogers' unusual business practices are not news to anyone either.

However, it is disturbing to learn that Rogers, a leading Canadian corporation, embraces this particular kind of unwholesome business practice. While I'm not so concerned about their commenting on our posts using search engine catch phrases, I am annoyed that they use unethical social media practices to drive traffic to benefit their interests, albeit in an all-thumbs way.

I guess Rogers will incorporate this latest incident into their company's general "let them howl" customer service and public relations policy. They're on the right track, then. There will be howls.