The spammers are alive and well folks. As people have moved from email to blogs for their communication spammers have gotten smart and followed them.

In the last six months the pressure has really been put on any type of blog site that accepts comments. Even Frappr maps are targets for those unscrupulous folks who embed useless links into your Social Media driven web pages.

What’s a social media lover to do? For starters, protecting your Social Media assets against spammers needs to be a high priority. If you’re considering hiring someone to build a Social Media property for your company, make sure that they have a clear strategy for ensuring that you are not flooded with spam. If you are running Social Media driven websites, take a look and make sure that they are set up to prevent comment and trackback spam from getting through.

And remember this. Just because it hasn’t happened yet doesn’t mean it won’t happen soon. You could very well wake up in the morning with 1000 or more spam comments on your blog site. I’m speaking from experience because it has happened to me in the last six months. The clean up was ugly and time consuming but it taught me some valuable lessons about protecting my Social Media assets.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

• Only use blogging tools that have features allowing you to moderate comments.
• Always set up your blogging tool to email you when a new comment is posted.
• Always take advantage of authentication tools like captcha’s to prevent someone from automatically posting comments.
• Always require that new comments sit in moderation unless the commenter has had a previously approved comment.
• Stay up to date on the latest tools and techniques for fighting spam.

To amplify my last recommendation I want to point you to a relatively new anti-spam service called Akismet. Akismet is brought to you by the folks who develop the very popular WordPress blogging platform.

Akismet is a plugin that is automatically installed into WordPress sites. If you’re using you’re own version of WordPress then you’ll need to sign up at www.wordpress.com to get a free API Key and then activate the Akisment plug in. If you’re using the WordPress.com service then you’re already protected. And if you’re not a WordPress user you can still get protection via their development plugins.

Akismet is maintaining a huge database of spam comments and will check your comments against that database before letting it get to the point where it reaches your moderation queue.

I’m sure you’re probably asking, “How well does it work?”

Let me tell you. I had been getting dozens of spam comments dumped into my moderation queue each day for the past several months. A couple of weeks ago I turned on Akismet for all of my WordPress powered blogs. The flood of spam into my queue has turned into a very slow trickle.

So i’m saving at least twenty minutes a day, which was the time I took to review comments in my moderation queue before declaring them as spam. But more imporantly, I can rest assured that the comments that are getting through don’t spoil the intent of my blog with useless links to sites touting weird prescription drugs or gambling or other oddities that have nothing to do with the message that I’m trying to share with the world.

[tags]Social Media, Blogging, Spam, Akismet[/tags]