If you haven’t found him yet, Bertalan Meskó is one of the best new-generation doctors making the most of social media. While he was still a med student his ScienceRoll blog won Blogger’s Choice in 2007, and last month it won Medgadget’s prestigious Best Medical Technologies/Informatics Weblog for the second year in a row. @Berci, as he’s known on Twitter, provides a glimpse of what healthcare will be like in the coming decades.
Now that he’s become an MD himself and is teaching, he’s taking it to the next step, inviting e-patients to talk directly to his students via two-minute YouTube videos. Here’s my submission. (This is my first “vlog” (video blog) so the quality’s not great – like everything we do online, it’ll improve with experience.)
[SAMPLE OF SPAM COMMENT – DISREGARD – SEE REPLY BELOW] American Health [redacted] is looking for partner blogs in the medical field. [It] is a health website which contains a large library of high quality medical videos. We are looking for website owners who are interested in featuring our content. We can offer content exchanges, link exchanges, and exposure to your brand. Contact us at our contact form on our web site.
Rather than deleting this and marking it as spam, as I usually do, I thought I’d edit out all the specifics but leave this here as a specimen of a kind of site to avoid.
First, it talks about link exchanges – that’s never a good sign – it’s someone who’s trying to build traffic to their own site.
Second, the comment doesn’t have anything to do with the post it’s on. Yes, people (or robots) get paid to go around dropping irrelevant comments everywhere.
Third, the commenter left a non-working email address. Sure sign of scumminess.
Sooooooo, so much for “high quality medical videos.”
BUT – sometimes a site owner will unknowingly hire a cheap marketing firm to boost traffic, without realizing they’re getting cheap junk and bad methods. In case that’s what happened here, I went to their site’s contact page and left them this message:
“Hi – I thought you’d want to know, whoever you’re paying to build traffic to your site, they’re using scummy comment spam to do it. Write me if you want specifics, or just fire them (presuming you find this to be bad for your reputation, as I do!)”
My guess is I won’t hear back…:)