I just finished deleting several SPAM “comments” from my blog. Like many, I receive several of these annoying messages each day pushing a variety of medications or other junk, and that’s not counting what I delete from my email inbox.
This SPAM is undoubtedly the handiwork of some pariah like the “Spam King” Sandford Wallace who was just ordered by a California judge to pay Facebook $711 million in damages for barraging the site’s users with junk mail and phony Wall posts.
As I purged my blog of the junk comments, I realized that I need to do a better job managing this stuff with plugins or perhaps make comments visible only through approval. My other thought was that I shouldn’t have to do anything. Nevertheless, the experience reminded me why we loathe SPAM. We hate the stuff because it…
- Is sent to us without our permission;
- Wastes our time and money;
- Wastes space;
- Is seldom, if ever, relevant to our interests or needs;
- Jeopardizes the well-being of our computers; and
- Potentially damages our reputations if someone hijacks our sites and sends it to our friends in our name.
Thinking about why we hate SPAM helped me better appreciate why the opposite approach is essential to good marketing. Seth Godin has been arguing for years that marketing should be based on permission. Marketers build strong relationships with consumers and essentially create a kind of opt-in relationship. Godin writes:
You say, “I will do x, y and z, I hope you will give me permission by listening.” And then, this is the hard part, that’s all you do. You don’t assume you can do more. You don’t sell the list or rent the list or demand more attention. You can promise a newsletter and talk to me for years, you can promise a daily RSS feed and talk to me every three minutes, you can promise a sales pitch every day (the way Woot does). But the promise is the promise until both sides agree to change it. You don’t assume that just because you’re running for President or coming to the end of the quarter or launching a new product that you have the right to break the deal. You don’t.
Why adopt this approach? Well, this opt-in relationship not only avoids irritating potential customers with irrelevant messages they are forced to purge from their inboxes, social networks and blogs, but it is a whole heck of a lot more effective for that very reason.
Photo Credit: Thomas Hawk
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
You raise a good point about all the negative effects of SPAM; the only silver lining is that it’s so widespread the social consequences are not as severe as in the past. By now it’s commonplace to have a friend who’s Facebook account got hacked. Doesn’t make it any less of a pain though….
Alex -
Thanks very much for your comment. You’re right – it is very common for someone to have their social networks compromised by the worst kind of spammers: those who use worms and other malware to hijack their accounts and use them to distribute more junk messages.