Over the past month I’ve been taking part in the Hub Challenge where a bunch of us are trying to write a crazy amount of articles in a month. I’m up to 36 now and as it’s sometimes late at night when I write them, I do try to spice them up a bit with a ‘different’ title.

Didn’t think anything of it; thought it might add a bit of humour to the proceedings to. One of them was ‘The mailto: command, a great way to harvest email addresses”.

All my Hubs get broadcast on Twitter (so do  all my posts, ask me about it sometime) and this was no exception so it went out to the great big world.

Now, to explain. Harvesting email addresses is a ‘Bad Thing’. It’s the way that web scraping robots get a lot of their email addresses to be used for spam. They go around, find websites with exposed email addresses and then they add them to their big spam database and send you lots of emails about Viagra and dating sites etc.

My Hub was actually about stopping this from happening on your site not about how to do it, but that didn’t stop someone from ‘un-following’ me on Twitter with the message below:

From @Synthaetica : yes, @andycal , when you post about “harvesting email addresses”, you are not going to be on the follow list. buh-bye.

Hmmmm. Point missed methinks.

At first I was going to post this as a warning with the line “don’t confuse your customers with crazy headlines”, but I’ve changed my mind. It hasn’t actually affected my Twitter follower count (it’s actually gone up), but I would make this comment to those who get upset at headlines in any media – “read the book, not the cover”.

We are surrounded by attention grabbing headlines on both the Internet and in traditional print – but the headline is only an extract of the story itself. You might read the rest of the story and discover something completely different – I know I do all the time.

So is there a moral to this? Well yes – many people go into ‘corporate mode’ and their online persona is completely different to how they behave in real life. It’s a bit like those people you meet down the pub who you share a pint with but then discover they’re complete arses when you phone them at work. This doesn’t wash on the Internet or in social media like Twitter, you need to be natural. If we’re all just keyboard tapping robots churning out what we think people want to here in order to never damage our brand then it would be boring.

The answer therefore is – “Be yourself”. I’m going to keep on writing headlines like this and you should do it too. Here are some of my others:

How to ruin your search rankings quickly

Cloaking your site to destroy your google ranking

I could rename them to something less ‘controversial’, but that would be a cop-out.

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