Yesterday I forwarded an email from a Fiona Hudson-Kelly advertising her bollocks email marketing training course. It’s actually the third piece of spam I’ve received from this particular clown: they’ve been coming at weekly intervals for three weeks now. She’s certainly pretty desperate to get me on her courses.
I took another look at the previous emails I had received from her — all advertising the same thing. Like the one posted yesterday, they are all addressed to “Hello There”, but they’re not all impersonal: the first email was tailored specifically to me and my clients: when informing me that I can now send out emails and actually track who opens them (no, really?), it named (albeit incorrectly capitalised) my own specific website. Well, almost. It named the website for an old Internet Relay Chat network that I briefly helped run when I was a teenager. It wasn’t mine, though it’s likely that I was one of several contacts on the site, and it’s possible that I was a contact on the domain name registration. Anyway, I can’t have used it more recently than 2003; the network moved on, and the domain name must have expired at least five years ago.
Even if the site had not closed half a decade ago, an unincorporated internet relay chat network frequented by half a dozen wannabe hackers and writers is not going to be interested in a £500 marketing training course in the east midlands.
By which I mean to say that Fiona Hudson-Kelly wouldn’t be able to spot a professionally managed email marketing campaign if it walked up to her and shouted “I’m a professionally fucking managed email marketing campaign” at her weird botox paralysed face. If the email marketing campaigns that Fiona Hudson-Kelly is teaching small businesses to use are anything like her own, then she is teaching companies to spam thousands of random people; people who could not possibly be any less relevant. Follow her example if you want to send unsolicited junk mail to anybody and everybody whose data was robotically harvested over half a decade ago, and is almost certainly out of date. Chances are, none of this spam will hit a relevant target — but there’s a good chance that you’ll piss off thousands of people in the process.
Everything about Fiona Hudson-Kelly’s online presence says “social media clown”: her robotic twitter feed, desperately trying to force sociality — the endless vacuous questions; are you enjoying Google Buzz (what the fuck, who uses Google Buzz?). Her absurd “Wordpress Blogg” (sic) that has been set up to syndicate twitter items and just looks awful for it. Her long list of worthless PR awards on LinkedIn. And most of all, that great grinning clown face all over her own website. This is somebody who has read a few buzzwords, doesn’t really have a clue what they mean, but has managed to set herself up with a twitter feed and a Wordpress account, and is taking money from gullible small businesses anyway. She probably even genuinely believes that she is an online marketing expert — after all, it’s notoriously difficult to spot one’s own incompetence, especially when stuck in an echo chamber of social media PR wank.
I’m being mean. This was just another incompetent small town business person who ran just another spam campaign. I should have hit the “report spam” button and moved on. I certainly shouldn’t get so personal about it.
Except that the most prominent thing of all about Fiona Hudson-Kelly’s online presence is not the mediocre twitter feed, the ludicrous Wordpress, the embarrassing LinkedIn or the frightening studio photographs. It’s the words training grant. (Indeed, the page of her website that explains the training grant is so extensively linked from her other sites that it is one of the top Google results for “Business Link training grant” — give her a SEO Expert award!)
Business Link is a government quango whose purpose, so far as I can tell, is to run a website full of advice for businesses, and to administer business grants like Train To Gain for HMRC, BIS, the EU, and the regional development agencies. They were recently criticised for spending £105 million on a bland website that looks like it cost a fraction of one percent of that cost.
It seems that Business Link / Train to Gain offer a grant of up to £1000 to the directors and senior management of small companies (5-249 employees). £500 of that is available with no strings attached; the rest is available if the business matches the funding. It can be no coincidence that there are dozens of management consultants and social media clowns offering courses for exactly £500 per person — including our own professional spammer. This way, businessmen can have a day out of the office with lunch included, and no expense to have to justify to the company. Consultants, marketing clowns, and other parasites are living very comfortable lives taking government money to tell company directors that they should have a Facebook page, without even a threat that companies might want their misspent money back.
If Fiona Hudson-Kelly and her fellow social media clowns were simply taking the money of gullible small provincial engineering and catering firms, I wouldn’t care. I’d have hit the “Report spam” button and moved on. But she’s not. She’s taking our money. Right now we are being asked to chose between our local libraries closing down or our rubbish not getting collected. The £15m Film Council has been abolished, and my borough have stopped sweeping the streets. We’ve been told to tighten our belts, while small company directors and social media clowns are still investing our money in free lunches and BMWs.
Aside:
It can be no coincidence that Fiona Hudson-Kelly’s LinkedIn states that she was once in human resources. Once upon a time, human resources were the little administrative part of a company or organisation who dealt with the boring recruitment forms and employment law compliance. Then at some point human resources grew and turned malignant, thinking that their area of expertise also included guiding staff development and booking training courses. And a thus a whole parasitic industry of management consultants and marketing clowns grew to take advantage of their naivety.
