Spam

Just because I decide to do business with you once doesn’t mean I want to hear from you every day. I know marketing specialist insist just the opposite, but they are on the verge of mass alienating a large swath of customers and destroying tools we communicate with.

Spam

Let’s quickly run through the history of spam in case you been living under a rock for the last few decades. It was originally a food stuff, and I have enjoyed it as a child and as musubi like the image from Wikipedia above. Somewhere along the way Monty Python made it into a joke about singing and dancing knights just repeating the name. Early on the Internet used this joke reference to label unwanted communications. Funny enough, that label stuck for anything that was an unrequested commercial communication.

OK, so we will use the definition of spam as unsolicited messages sent in bulk. This has become a large scale industry. Companies are told by marketing experts that they need to keep their customer’s attention and keep the communications going. Industry players encode this concept in their names like Constant Contact and GetResponse, while players who call out that they blindly send too much email in their names EmailOctopus, mailchimp and SendinBlue also exist. [As a note, I googled each of these services and clicked on the ad supported to link to get their names and URLs. I hope they appreciate having to pay for that. :-) ]

The marketing concept of always be engaging the customer probably comes from research of how to keep a customer engaged and turn them into a repeat purchaser. OK, but here is the problem. If I deal with say 10 companies, they are all wanting me to read their emails (or view posts on social media if I would partake in that). News flash, I don’t want to hear from you.

What marketers think of as the way to move the business along, we view as just another version of distasteful human interactions that tend to have lines like “Coffee is for Closers” somewhere in it. If you don’t know where that comes from, here is the clip below. The movie is worth watching and says a lot about modern companies and sales.

Email

Email is a wonderful tool for communicating. I can spend time reading when I am not working on a project that requires concentration or really doing anything else. I can also spend some reasonable amount of time crafting a response, because the only email I should be getting is important conversations with other people. Spam takes the time I have to spend on email and wastes part of it. It wastes the mental energy I have allocated for email and makes me not want to use email as the tool it was intended to be. A lot of people keep looking for the “answer” or “replacement” to email, but what they don’t realize is that email isn’t the problem. It’s how it gets used that is, and spam in the worst of the problem. Those problems need to be addressed or the replacement for email will always have the same problems.

So when I see a message from a car dealer I bought a car from in 2018 every other morning I feel like they are stealing a set of important resources from me. Time and attention. As I get older I realize that those are two of the most valuable resources I have. Repeat this 2-3 dozen times for everyone I have spent money with and it gets to be a real problem. For many people it may be multiple times this number. If you spend time on any social media service it is probably exponentially more.

Basic problem

The marketing staff and services tell you that each of the messages are minor, too small to alienate the customer. Well, if it was once a month or quarter maybe I wouldn’t notice, especially if they were spread out. The problem is that they come in all the time. Keeping a small log of time I spend on email I find that I spend more time deleting spam than I do reading and responding to emails. On days where I am out of touch, when I do get to my inbox it isn’t unusual to have 100 new messages and more than half will be spam of some sort.

Social media is even worse. When I glance at Linkedin it is a litany of things I don’t want to waste my time on. Twitter is much the same (and I don’t follow brands). Each one is designed to entice you to want to spend a little more time ingesting their message and if I do I come away with the mental equivalent of empty calories. I have gained nothing but lost time I could have spent on something more useful to myself or others. We are literally on the cusp of expending resources to make our society better in exchange for potentially converting 10 out of 100 people into purchasers of buying something they don’t need or want!

Solution

There is a lot of talk about regulating algorithms given all the revelations around facebook and what they do. This would extend to all marketing, because what facebook does is just a souped up version of any marketer does anywhere else. Trust me, the marketing departments at every company wished they could do what facebook does.

You can’t regulate algorithms though. We saw how that failed over the last 40 years with strong crypto. In this case the problem is more cut and dry. While we see the problem as the algorithms, the problem is in us. We accept this way of being fed through our eyeballs, of having our attention divided (often times from our loved ones and other things we care about). We even reward the organizations that do this to us by making the advertising pay off. It’s really like blaming the ice cream parlor for being overweight. Who’s fault is it really?

I will confess, I am guilty of this also. There are a few electronics vendors that I get emails from once a week or so and I do buy things in the solicitations occasionally. They have turned those “free to send” emails into real dollars on the back end. My actions have encouraged them to send more. Luckily none of those companies have increased the email volume to daily, or multiple times a day, yet.

So the real solution is inside us already. We know what we are willing to accept (or even want on an occasional basis), and what is literally spam. All we have to do is make the companies know what we don’t want, and that it makes us think less of them. That’s right, unsubscribing or blocking is not the solution by itself. Here is what we all have to do.

• Unsubscribe and/or block the messages we don’t want.
• Mark them as SPAM so they are more likely to be filtered before they hit our eyes.
• If there is a place to leave a comment, let the company know that receiving SPAM makes you mad and less likely to work with them.
• Publicly tell them that all the noise they generate is unwanted and makes you want to take your business elsewhere.

Those last 2 are important. All companies work from a general rule of thumb that bad news is 10 times worse than good news. If you turn their “good news” message into even a small bit of “bad news” you will be scaring them, especially if multiple people do it.

Let me start off by casting the first stones.

• Amazon, just because I bought something like a pair of shoes from you doesn’t mean I want to see more shoes in my inbox. They last a while. Every time I get one of these emails I am less likely to buy that type of thing from you.
• Linkedin, I don’t care that someone I don’t remember got promoted or that someone posted a message about how to market better. I will not be reading your feed as retaliation and I’m better off for it.
• Humble Bundle, OK, I bought some books from you for a charity. I don’t need to get emails from you daily. You haven’t had any decent books since and the games aren’t interesting to me (do they run on Linux?).
• Hulu, HBO Max and all the other streaming services, I have you because I cut the cord. Don’t send me email asking me to search for things to watch. You are literally inviting me to waste time to find things I didn’t want to watch to waste more time on!
• Melodee Music, you don’t bother me often but my kids are graduated. I now have a dim view of you for thinking I still want to buy reeds or something.
• Ourisman Toyota, I bought a car from you. It still runs. Every time I get an email from you I think maybe the next car can come from any of the other Toyota dealers in the area. Your only saving grace is that they are probably just as bad.

So I’ve taken the first step for myself. Who will join me?