Anyone following me on Twitter knows how I feel about direct welcome messages. Auto-DM me, and you are auto-unfollowed. My apologies for being so judgmental, but 90% of the time they turn out to be someone whose use of Twitter bothers me anyway. If it’s a welcome message that doesn’t ask me to visit their blog or claim my free gift, I will still keep them on board- even if it is obviously automated, at least that’s less irritating.
On the other hand, personalized messages are just fine. Especially when they come from your favorite beer.
Lately I’ve been struggling with a bunch of spam e-mails from companies I’ve never heard of. Some have these have turned out to be nearly impossible to unsubscribe from. Today was no different, as I tried to unsubscribe from a certain list to no avail. It brought me to a page which said “The request did not include a valid MID. Please have your MID setup properly to utilize this page.”
Since I had no idea what MID meant and no time to figure it out, I assumed (correctly) that I had not been removed from this list.
A few hours later, I received this message:
Dear Elizabeth,
Earlier today you opened an email from us announcing the new and improved Customer Management IQ website. Unfortunately some of the links in that email were not functioning correctly and as a result you may not have been able to open all of the articles you wanted to view.
We apologize for this inconvenience and would like to provide you with the direct links to the items in the earlier email.
I realized I must have gotten myself on the hook to receive these e-mails from downloading a white paper or something of the sort. Silly me. But how nice of them to apologize for their e-marketing shortcomings. Sadly they still have a few bugs to work out, since the unsubscribe link was still not functioning properly.
My advice to companies: your messages are not forever-relevant to your subscribers. Be kind and make it simple for them to get away from you if they wish. Nobody likes too much noise on the web or clutter in their inbox.
The difference in standards online vs. offline are of great interest to me. Somehow, certain things are acceptable in cyberspace that are not (normally) accepted in the real world. A friend once sent me this video rendition of how Facebook would be in real life. And it’s funny for a reason:
Why is it that some actions are not only easier, but often commonplace, in an online social setting? For example, following the lives of complete strangers on Twitter. Please don’t get me wrong; I have met amazing people and learned so much from being active on Twitter, and if you read any other posts of mine, you know I praise and enjoy this network, among many others. What I’m really looking at now is peoples’ real-life reactions to online behavior.
I really enjoyed this article from Newsweek by Steve Tuttle in which he explains why he is quitting Facebook. His daughter was very seriously upset about his jumping on the Facebook bandwagon. Perhaps this isn’t as far-fetched from reality as I originally thought; after all, no self-respecting teenager would ever let their parents be present in their social life offline. A co-worker told me his daughters laughed when he told them he was on Facebook. I know my parents hesitate to “friend” my friends on Facebook. I wonder: Why shouldn’t they? They are friends offline, aren’t they?
It seems like there are a set of unwritten standards for how to interact on Facebook and other social networks, and nobody has really talked about them in depth, but they are there and everyone knows about them. In a conversation with Adam Metz about social media strategy, we talked about how potential business prospects would be offended if contacted via Facebook. But LinkedIn and Plaxo are fair game? Now there’s another set of standards for how to interact on different networks?
This really does make sense to me. What’s interesting to me is how online seems to be a reflection of life in general. Facebook is happy hour with your friends. LinkedIn in a professional organization or industry conference, and Twitter is… some sort of platonic speed dating? Book club, maybe? Life online is almost a catalyst for discussing reality.
Random thoughts of mine. Please feel free to share yours. I think this would make a rather interesting conversation. Thanks for reading.
Anyone following me on Twitter knows how I feel about direct welcome messages. Auto-DM me, and you are auto-unfollowed. My apologies for being so judgmental, but 90% of the time they turn out to be someone whose use of Twitter bothers me anyway. If it’s a welcome message that doesn’t ask me to visit their blog or claim my free gift, I will still keep them on board- even if it is obviously automated, at least that’s less irritating.
