Chris Locke, a member of the Cluetrain Manifesto Gang of Four, has launched two new blogs, one called Ex-Blogging Officer (evidently the Chief Blogging Officer has left to pursue other opportunities), and a second in conjunction with a new book he’s writing, “Mystic Bourgeoisie.”
If you don’t know about “Gonzo Marketing” or Rageboy and EGR, know this: Locke’s blogs will leave you gorged on food for thought.
Doesn’t the guy ever sleep?
On Monday, eMarketer reported on a survey conducted by Mirapoint and the Radacati Group. Here’s a link to Mirapoint’s press release, which notes that “11 percent of users purchase products and services from spam emails.” In January, a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 6 percent of Americans online buy from spammers.
What’s a few percentage points among friends? Let’s split the difference and call it 8.5 percent. Now, if we accept the recent ClickZ statistic that the population of active Internet users in the U.S. is 137.54 million, that’s 11.69 million people who have purchased from spammers.
To me, these numbers seem awfully high. In the absence of viewing the survey’s specific methodology regarding how “spam” is defined, I suspect the numbers indicate something else: that “spam” has become the casual computer user’s term for commerce-related email of any kind, just as “Kleenex” means any kind of tissue and “Band-Aid” means any kind of bandage.
For many, “Have you purchased from a spammer?” equates with, “Have you purchased from someone who has sent you an email?” That the email is 100 percent legitimate, double opt-in, totally above-board, and ethically beyond reproach is irrelevant.
It’s email + it’s trying to sell something = spam.
Takeaway for Marketers: Even after you take every pain to follow every rule, your email may still be perceived as spam.
According to this article, TiVo is “adding features to make advertising more interactive.” The key sentence in the article, I believe, is this: “TiVo said it developed the new features in response to feedback from advertisers.”
Now, if they had developed the new features in response to feedback from TiVo customers, then they’d have something.
This arrived in my emailbox yesterday:
Hello from Amazon.com.
Good news! We’ve just lowered the price of “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” from $17.99 to $16.99.
You don’t need to do anything to get the lower price — we are automatically issuing you a $1.00 refund. This refund should be processed in the next few days and will appear as a credit on your next billing statement. We’ll also send you a follow-up email to confirm the refund once it has been completed.
Thanks again for shopping at Amazon.com. We hope you enjoy your book!
That dollar refund cost Amazon $1.5 million, according to sales figures reported by Finance24 … but it undoubtedly bought them many times that amount in goodwill and positive customer relations.
Reuters reports that “substantial challenges remain to the in-flight use of mobile phones even if communications regulators ease their ban.”
Good.
