I’ve spent the last few days researching a story for Reputation Online on mechanical networking. The article has been published this morning.

My motivation was simple. Two weeks ago I was pissed off when I learnt from a prospect that a rival agency had touted mechanical networking as a means of quickly building a guaranteed following.

I’ve tried insofar as is possible to bring my journalist training to bear and report with impartiality; without sounding overly pious I hope that I’ve succeeded. It’s an important issue.

Thanks to David Cushman, Ian Brodie, Mat Morrison, Michael Litman, Milo Yiannopoulos, Paul Fabretti, Robin Grant, Simon Collister and Tim Hoang for their help. I’ve only managed to fit a fraction of their comments into the final article.

David has posted his interview in full on his blog: Why I hate automation in human communication.