2010-02-27
An 'email marketing' wish
One of my spam peculiarities is that I really dislike spam being delivered to me even if it's been tagged as spam and gets immediately filed away into the far depths of the filesystem, never to be seen again. Back when I was more actively involved in anti-spam stuff, I spent a fairly large amount of effort not just recognizing spam but rejecting it at SMTP time; not just because it was the right approach when possible, but because I actively liked having that happen. Unfortunately, these days (for various reasons) far less spam going to me gets rejected at SMTP time than gets filed away. All of which is a round-about explanation for why I care about a self-serving wish and dream for people doing 'email marketing'.
Namely:
You know all of those web bugs and tracking beacons that email marketers spread all over their email messages? I wish that they'd actually use them. I don't care so much if they use them to send more spam to people who actually read and respond to their messages; what I wish is that they'd notice when people don't, when there's no indication that their email is going to anywhere except a black hole. When they notice this lack of activity, they could perfectly well cut back their email sending activity to that address and eventually stop.
(They could get around how email clients these days don't show images by default by making the images an intrinsic part of the message, so that people who are actually interested will enable the feature and let themselves be tracked.)
Of course, all of this is an impractical dream and I know it; there are endless numbers of reasons that even nominally reputable email marketers can find to not stop sending spam to addresses, no matter how absurd the excuse.
2010-02-20
Viral marketing versus word of mouth marketing
Here's something it's time to say outright.
If you're getting the impression from previous entries that you can't have any fun any more with all of those viral marketing tricks that people are so fond of, you'd be correct. Viral marketing is one of those poisoned well ideas, like affiliate marketing; too many spammers have hit too many people and systems for you to do it unless you are really good at doing it very lightly.
(You can get a certain amount of the innocent and the new to the net. But everyone who's been on the net for very long is overly familiar with getting barrages of invitations, notifications, or whatever from the latest website that one of their less wise friends has signed up with, and is not going to be impressed.)
So, what's the difference between viral marketing (bad) and word of mouth marketing (acceptable)? It's pretty simple:
Viral marketing is all of the things that you do and all of the features you build into your systems in order to make your website (or program or cause) spread. It is all of those automatic Facebook updates, all of those tweets, all of those clever plans to give people rewards if they turn over information on other people to you or get other people to sign up, all of those invites and reminders and notifications. In short, all of the things that you come up with to push your website in front of other people. When I phrase it that way, I hope it's clear why it's spam.
(Pushing things at uninterested and unwilling people is one of the moral definitions of spam. It's also one of the practical definitions of marketing, which is one of those eternal conflicts.)
Word of mouth marketing is your users telling other people about you (without the assistance of a 'click here to tell your friends' button). It is the enthusiastic tweet, the user-written Facebook status update, the 'you have to see this' email. There are two good things about word of mouth; first, it means that you have succeeded in creating genuinely enthusiastic users, and second, it's probably going to a reasonably receptive audience.
(And if they're not receptive, they're unlikely to blame you, they're going to blame their overly-enthusiastic friend.)
PS: I'm aware that this is pretty much a futile quest.