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Firstly a belated Happy New year to everybody, I hope the holidays when well and the shock of normality has now been overcome?
SPAM appears to be a general pet hate in the cyber community and I’m amazed to see the steps that some people will take in response to getting SPAMMED to the extent that the Golden Spider award team have been ordered to pay €500 to Brightspark Consulting, see http://brightspark-consulting.com/blog/?p=424 .
I hold a slightly different view. Almost every one of us is earning a living based on the fact that we or the company we work for sells something. Even if we work for a charity they are still selling what they do to the general public as is apparent by the number of TV adverts you will see for charitable organisations these days.
Based on this the companies we work for have to market their products and this is done in a range of formats from advertising in newspapers and magazines, to TV ads to posters on the back of buses. Now to be honest when I’m watching my favourite movies on TV nothing is more frustrating that having to sit through a bunch of adverts but hey that the commercial world that we live in.
So while we take this random form of marketing for granted and most likely we or the companies we work for are doing it, when the same principal is applied to email marketing it seems to cross some form of sacred threshold.
OK receiving a hundred emails with specials offers for Viagra is a bit over the top but there are now several methods of blocking this sort of crap. Likewise if a credible business sends you stuff you don’t want it’s easily deleted or blocked. And why should you have to? Well maybe some of us whan to know what’s going out there in case a good opportunity comes along and for the same reason that we accept every other form of advertising.
It’s OK not to agree – it’s just my personal view.
Filed under: Email
SPAM differs from other forms of marketing in that you cannot “opt” out. Traditional marketing has a cost, so it is in the marketers best interest to ensure that the people seeing the advert are interested. It does not make sense for an IT company to advertise high end servers in the Horse and Hound, the advert is best placed in an IT magazine where the readers, simply due to the fact that they’ve purchased the magazine, have shown they are interested in such advertisements and so will not be surprised to see the advert there.
Possibly the real danger with SPAM is the people behind it, and the techniques they are using:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/12/the_nugache_wor.html
Happy new Year!
Richard
The problem I had with the Golden Spiders was that they blatantly ignored my attempts to remove myself from their lists. They were bombarding me with emails and phone calls. This is not a simple “come and buy from me”, it’s more of a grab me by the lapels, push me up against the wall and shout in my face “enter our awards’.
They agreed to pay €500 to a charity of my choice as compensation and do you know what? 1 month later, they still haven’t paid up.
On so many levels, the Golden Spiders and the way they operate flies in the face of how responsible companies carry out business.
Hi Maryrose,
I don’t think anybody could argue that the Golden Spiders award team when over the top in their marketing campaign though I doubt they thought you would take the action that you did.
I guess the point I’m making generally is that SPAM is defined as any unsolicited email but I feel in reality there are different types of SPAM. You get the Viagra crap etc, to the Golden Spider awards to companies who fire off the odd email to introduce their services. For example today an Irish company email us because they do spare computer parts. I’ve never heard of them before but we do buy parts so I’ve kept the email to hand as it might come in useful.
I just feel that some individuals go over the top when it comes to receiving any unsolicited email regardless of its content. What’s constitutes a reasonable amount of contact and what’s is excessive, well that’s hard to define.
Good luck with getting them to hand over the money.