This morning I received a Facebook message from a friend that read,

Look!  cnbc10home . com

My initial reaction was that something she or I did made it onto CNBC’s home blog, and that she typed the message from her phone, hence the spaces around the dot (“.”).

I typed the URL manually into my browser and was presented with this:

Today I’m in Palos Verdes visiting my family.  The spammers got my location from my browser and tailored the article to me.  I read to the third paragraph before I caught on to the spam campaign.

These spammers know marketing — they fooled me into reading two paragraphs of their campaign, which is more than I typically read of blogs my friends send me.  This is what they did right:

• They told a story — people want to read a story.
• They catered the material to me (geo-relevant in this case) — people want to read about relevant topics.
• They grabbed my attention with their title and opening paragraph.
• They grabbed my attention with their social media message — they figured out a way to spark my curiosity by fooling me.

Well done, spammers.  And thanks for the marketing insights.