How to make a bad first impression

Blogging is a fairly new medium.  I have seen many PR people who just are befuddled about how to leverage blogs for their clients.  There is no book of blogging etiquette for them to study.  Even companies who hold themselves out as "marketing and relationship" experts just don't know squat about the blogging world.  So when they venture out without a safety net, invariably they screw it up.  A case in point is a rookie mistake that a Joshua Lewis of a company called Twelve Horses committed today. 

Joshua left a long comment on one of my recent articles today trying to flatter me about how in doing research he stumbled across my blog was so impressed, yada, yada, yada.  He then told me about how a company he is working with Solera Networks may be interesting to me. He proceeded to write a commercial for Solera Networks. That would be bad enough if that was all he did.

Joshua had no idea that many security bloggers talk to each other pretty regularly too.  It seems that our boy Josh was pretty busy running around to a bunch of security blogs, spouting similar comments about how he loved them best and touting Solera.  Well that about sealed it for me.  I have deleted his comment as spam.  Deleting comments is something I seldom if ever do by the way.  But this kind of behavior needs to be dealt with.  These kinds of shenanigans are not acceptable.

So Josh, not only is your comment touting Solera now gone, but I am calling out what exactly you were up too.  I am pretty sure you have done Solera more harm than any good you could have done.  Maybe next time before you think you are going to game the system, you should learn how to play the game.