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Think you're tired of the most asymptotic election results in human history? Hey, be glad you're not Manuel Recount, Florida citizen. Try opting out of bad PR, dudes What do these people ...
...have in common? Aside from looking a generic foundation board? The unlikely answer is this: they sanction spam. Specifically, this... Please spread the word to your students. TO REGISTER: ... which was apparently sent, without permission, to a large pile of people that regretably included Seth Godin, author of Permission Marketing and IdeaVirus, and like, the last guy you want to send mail for which the recipient has not given permission — or, in the correct parlance, opted in. Here's what Seth opted to say about it: If it's okay for a company with these guys on the board to send unsolicited commercial e-mail to people who don't want to get it, then I guess it's okay for everyone. I assumed that the letter must have been sent in error. That someone must have taken a personal e-mail and thoughtlessly sent it far and wide. Or maybe I was on a list that I didn't remember signing up for. I couldn't imagine that they had willfully crossed the line into spamming people. So I called. I spoke to Catherine Williams. That's her name at the bottom of the note. And not only didn't she deny sending the spam, she was sort of proud of it. She suggested that if I didn't like getting spam, well, then I should just hit the delete key. The reason I'm spending an entire newsletter on this phone conversation is that we're seeing a new erosion of the aversion to spam. I'm very concerned that spam is about to become business as usual, something that's done "because everyone else does it" and thus (because it's pretty close to free for the sender) extremely widespread. More and more, marketers are asking whether they can move into more grey areas, sending stuff to "targeted" spam lists. They're itching to figure out ways to interrupt you in increasingly powerful ways. Glad to help scratch 'em. Sales hooliganism in the U.K. Tom Matrullo reports this wad of sales bravado from The Register:
Embrace & Ignore I've seen entire trade shows that take up less space than Microsoft alone occupies here at Comdex. There are towns with fewer people than Microsoft deployed to hawk their many goods on the show floor. So it was reasonable, I assumed, for the company to devote a fraction of one kiosk, or even one floor geek, to Microsoft Office 2001, the new and highly praised office suite for Macintosh. When I asked at the Office 2000 kiosk, they handed me a 10-piont sales sheet. When I asked if they had somebody there I could talk to about it (because, so far, I @#$% hate it), they said, sheepishly, "Sorry." No shit.
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