Bots on social. The new spam.  The new time bandits.

It’s pretty clear that modern marketers are using a lot of AI powered bots to now connect with entrepreneurs on social media.

Yet no startup founder I know has time to waste on distractions and spam.  We don’t have endless teams to scan through our emails and messages searching for genuine partners or approaches. We have to do it ourselves.

But the adding of additional spam channels is taking us away from the main job of growing our business and delighting customers.

The Latest Approach

The latest approach I had was an interesting one. Interesting in that it was exceptionally bad from someone that (apparently) should know better, and is a purportedly leader in AI tech.

A CEO of an apparent AI company contacted me on X out of the blue with a message request. This was not someone I was following or knew anything about.  Accepting messages from fellow CEOs who have interesting profiles however is something that’s business as usual for me, and many entrepreneurs.

So, after accepting the message request his opening statements were nothing short of weird.

It started with “Hello, how are you?”.  And that’s it.

Yep, pretty spammy.  It’s a question that is reserved for friends, not a business introduction. Certainly not the sort of approach you expect from US CEO you’ve never spoken to making a pitch.

So, I ignored it, but now with my radar was tweaked.

His second approach a few days later was ”How about we connect? Here’s my calendar.”

Yep, another really strange response for 2 people that have never spoken. That was the sum total of the message.  Again, not so polite, not so professional, and certainly not a good pitch.

But I gave him the benefit of the doubt.  I inquired; a polite “what’s this about?” question.

Again, the response was non-descriptive.  A long message along the lines of “I want to collaborate” but without details about what about.

Now it’s this ‘guy’ doesn’t know that the word collaboration is one of my pet hate words.

It means nothing. In fact, we have an article on our help centre that explains to people that if they want to pitch something then just pitch it. Just don’t dance around it with weasel words like collaboration.  Our Help Article gives suggestions to pitch and outlines how we are in the market to buy all sort of good things but hiding your offerings isn’t a great way to build a business, nor a business relationship.

But by now, my antenna was built well and truly up about the fact that this was a very impersonal response, probably not coming from the CEO himself.

But I still gave ‘him’ (this bot is male in my mind as they adopted a male persona) one last chance explaining that startup CEOs are exceptionally busy so if he could focus the pitch a little it would help.

The Bot Doesn’t Escalate to a Human

Obviously, the bot didn’t pass it onto a real person to respond.  Nor was it particularly skilled in creating a conversation.  It was sort of pre-LLM era.

This time I got a long winded, again vague, response containing lots of ‘weasel words’ and buzz words about ’long term roadmaps’, ‘LLMs’ and a non-descriptive case study of a clearly enterprise client with 3m records.

And a whole lot of Blah blah blah blah blah blah that again gave me no idea on what he or his business offers.

Lots of words that were very enterprise, very corporate, very buzzwordy, but totally unrelated to tech startups.  And not even using everyday business English.

Now, I’m Australian and my language can be a bit different than UK English, US English or Middle Eastern English. Let alone more ‘fruity’.  But having travelled and worked in over 100 countries I know that social pleasantries, and business introductions aren’t that different around the world.

The message finished with another demand (not an offer or request mind you) to schedule a meeting when it suited me.

And so, I bluntly sort of said “No. I don’t understand what you’re pitching and we’re not in the market for outsourcing core tech anyway”. And left it there.

And then I got again a very bot response with lots of blah blah blah blah. All overly-perfectly worded but without meaning or a message.

Cold Calling on Social Could Suffer

I use this as one example of 5-15 approaches a day we’re getting on social at present. Not just on email, which is the traditional spamming medium, but now coming through on all sorts of social media and messaging apps.

I’d expect this latest spam technique will make it harder for all the legitimate businesses out there to try to cut through the noise of the internet and reach new customers.

The consequences of this growth in social-spam-bot are that we, and prospects, move into a ‘reject-first’ mode and ignore by default messages from people we don’t know.

Cold calling on social could suffer dramatically.

Will this see the return of SEO, or in person conferences to meet new suppliers and prospects?

Will this see the growth in antispam and blocking technology?

Will this see businesspeople move away from social media and group messaging?

I suspect yes is the answer to all these questions.

I find that I’m personally using Search a lot more in 2024.  Where I actively go looking for solutions to the issues I’m focused on, and I’m beginning to ignore inbound approaches.

That in itself is another series or learnings, including how to make sure your website has everything a prospect needs to begin a conversation.  But that can wait for another blog.

The sad thing about this latest example is that the CEO and his business might actually offer a great product or service to someone.

But the first impressions of his AI tech were so bad that he won’t get another chance to engage for a long time to come.  And in startup land who can dis their potential clients that much?