Slashdot Mirror
How To Convince My Boss Not To Spam?
An anonymous reader writes "The small travel agent that I work for recently received an email from one of our competitors with several thousand of their potential customers in the 'To:' and 'Cc:' fields. My boss now wants to use these addresses to send unsolicited advertisements. I would like to convince him not to do this, as I believe that this practice is morally wrong and legally dubious. However, morals don't go very far in the business world, so I'm asking Slashdot: what business-oriented arguments can I use to dissuade my boss from spamming?"
sad, but true.
Simply tell him that, usually, spam is filtered and deleted automatically. Once he sent a sufficiently large amount of spam, the filter will filter away the legitimate e-mails too.
...then it's up to your boss. If he won't listen and you REALLY don't like it, start looking for another job. However make sure it's important enough to give your job up over. If morals are important to you I think you'll find that no matter what job you do there are going to be aspects of it you aren't comfortable with. At the end of the day you have to be sure you can live with yourself.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Here's some of the stuff that's likely to happen to your company if it sends those messages:
* Your mail server will be added to blacklists. Legitimate messages you send later may disappear with no indication that they have done so, causing endless frustration and possibly lost money.
* Complaints may reach your web site's hosting provider, who may take it offline. Seriously: this happened to one of my clients once. This does happen.
* Some recipients are likely to be annoyed and may decide to never do business with your company. The long-term costs of this could be significant.
* Depending on where you're based, this could be illegal under either protection of privacy laws (e.g. the UK's Data Protection Act) or anti-spam laws (e.g. several state laws in the U.S.). Your company may receive a hefty fine because of it.
Send a notice to all the email addresses with a notice informing them that your competitor has been disclosing their email address in all the emails they send out.
A small signature indicating who you are, and a link to your website would be enough to bring some of them to you.
This could be considered a public-service to those people.
It also could be a trap and some of those email address could be honey pots with the hope that you send email to them and get yourself put on the spam lists.
So, at the risk of blowing my karma for the next 200 years:
Either do the job or quit.
Seriously. You got hired to do his bidding, if he wants to spam let him reap the consequences, make careful note of your objections. Then also admit you're a tool.
And if you can't live with that then grow some backbone and quit. There has to be other employment for someone with your skills.
MP3 Search Engine
Does your company sell v1agra or c1alis? Or the organic forms of these, or the "legit" ones from Canada? Then its green light. Otherwise, your company will be equated with these companies.
The dreaded I for one will not do business with Amazon, Buy.com and several minor companies specifically because I have received unsolicited (aka "partner") spam from them. I disapprove of the practice and will pay a couple of dollars to avoid companies who engage in it.
I would say the best argument against spamming is that it damages the brand. Sales reps can proudly claim that they are above their competitors in that "we do not spam."
It might be a better angle to subtly reveal that your competitor has leaked private information and that your company chose to take the high road by discarding it.
Also, don't die on this cross. Companies spam, as a rule.
FairTax baby!
Tell them it would give your travel agency a bad rep. No one reads spam these days and would most likely piss them off. Which does not go good for business.
You could also say that this could be a setup on part of your competitor to see how you would act in such a morally damning area. Maybe they would base their own future actions based on this. Think about it: Who gives To and CC fields and email's a copy to their competitors. ITS A TRAP (you may not believe it but to convince your boss you may have to do that)
I'm not an expert when it comes to email marketing, but I have had some experience with it before... To my knowledge, any credible mass-mail service will send the emails so that it's addressed to a single person (per email). If they are dumb enough to expose all of their clients in the TO and CC fields, it seems like they're asking for trouble. Of course, this may not solve for the moral dilemma, but it's not like your boss is going out of his way and buying a list of email leads (which is ridiculous); they're all right there for the picking! They only argument I can think of is telling him to research the target prospects and send mail based upon that.. then it's not really unsolicited - more like cold calling. A lot of people don't take into consideration that some email *is* targeted, and it really is no different than picking up the phone and calling the customer directly, or sending them something by mail... While cold calling is becoming more and more obsolete in today's business environment, doing some research and choosing some leads isn't really all that bad - especially when your competitor is kind enough to do some of the leg work for you.
1. It's an abuse of personal data, since the owner of that data (the individual) did not opt in. In many countries (particularly the UK) this is illegal and can land you in a lot of trouble.
2. If you're a small company, your reputation is going to be worth a lot more than one or two customers who may answer your email. Doing something that's at worst illegal and and at best irritating is hardly going to help your reputation.
3. Business ethos and ethics matter. As a consumer, I often know that dealing with a small company could cost slightly more than buying from a large one with economies of scale. However, I may feel it is worth it if the service is better or if I identify positively with the company. I have broken off relations in the past with companies that marketed too aggressively. This is entirely rational behaviour and not something limited to techies who "get" spam and are over-protective of their inboxes.
Cheers,
Martin
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, available from Packt Publishing.
Hire spamming agency to spam your potential customers on behalf of your competitors. Compare your sales figures with your competitors at the end of a quarter. There you've solid proof to convince your boss.
I would argue that for his business, the effort and risk involved makes sending unsolicited mail a losing proposition, that the hidden costs of setting up and maintaining the mailing list makes it non-profitable. Sending unwanted mails is not like distributing flyers, not even like unsolicited telephone calls, as there is less chance of getting past filters.
If you're the computer guy, I would tell him that it's an idea that the agency should only explore after Projects X, Y, and Z are done, as they have a better chance of generating new business at less cost. Then let it die from neglect.
The things you see when you don't have any mod points :-(
Anyway Absolutely spot on, a competitors mailing list is marketing golddust, you could probably get a lot of sales data without too much hassle, emails going to the same company would be a good target indicator. Google API searching with the email domain could winnow out the people with websites (
...but actually I think it's insightful. We keep getting such stupid mail, too, and I've done exactly what you suggest, with good results. ;)
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard disk?
That is partially incorrect, or at least not as black and white as you make it sound.
The short version is: Lack of ethics alone is no guarantee of success, by itself. There is more than one kind of sociopath, and more than one outcome. The smart ones do end up CEOs and on the cover of magazines. The stupid ones end up bankrupt and/or in jail.
So while stealing your competitor's customers _is_ good, the real issue is how you do it.
A. Spam is a rather low probability of success business. The majority of people don't answer to it, and in fact far more just become annoyed at you and/or blacklist you. It works for spamming normal people, because, well, if 0.1% of the recipients buy something, and you spammed ten million, well, you do the maths. The same maths can work against you when you're dealing with a small number of corporate customers. If you spam 20 corporations you got from one CC, chances are you'll gain nothing, and get only the bad parts.
B. Spam works mostly on, well, dumb people. Companies have too many layers of people whose job is to prevent doing something stupid. Your spam would have to go through everyone from the mail admin whose job is to block spam (if nothing else, because the CEO wouldn't get any job done at all if he was buried alive in a billion spam messages), to procurement and controlling, to the secretary of the boss you're trying to spam. Even that boss probably isn't as dumb as you assume, if he got to be successful in business, but even he is not the only one you must get past.
But even if they were no better than the average population, that chance goes down spectacularly by sheer number of people involved. Even if you managed to craft your spam as to get a whole 1% response rate from normal people, if there are as little as 3 different people who have to approve that purchase, the chance becomes one in a million.
Companies also move slowly and don't change suppliers or providers overnight. It's not like spamming Joe Sixpack who might be drunk enough to go, "ya know, I always wanted herbal pills." A company of any size above mom-and-pop shops will even deal with you at all, doesn't do things on a drunk impulse. There'll be lots of meetings and memos shoved around before you even get a chance to make your offer. Trying to bypass that process might work, if you're some manager's cousin or drinking buddy, but don't think that just one email is anywhere near enough. An offer out of nowhere that didn't go through that approval process, will most likely be ignored completely.
C. While it may be good for business to be a sociopath, it's very bad for business to get the reputation as one. The successful sociopath is the one who always has a convincing excuse or pretext, not the one advertises, basically, "I have my own company and I'm a bigger arsehole than goatse.cx." Businesses try hard to whitewash their reputation and pose as honest, upstanding pillars of the community. Because it's good for business. PR backlashes can do a hell of a lot of harm. Daikatana for example is the most visible example of a game that was merely mediocre, but got thoroughly sunk by a hell of bad PR backlash. It works in other domains too.
Becoming known as a spammer works when you have nothing to lose. If you're a two bit crook selling pressed parsley pills as ancient herbal medicines out of your basement, well, you don't really have much to lose. It's not like you have steady long-term customers or a business depending on your image in any community, so you can't lose them. If you are a more traditional business, though, you may not want that kind of reputation. And even the two bit crooks eventually have to change names, make more fly-by-night companies, etc, to keep peddling their goods.
D. Spam gets blacklisted fast. There's a reason spammers use faked senders, backscatter, etc. Because otherwise they get blocked fast, their ISP pulls the plug, etc.
And again, companies have people whose _job_ is to make sure spam doesn't get through. They _will_
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It will all work dandy unless the boss is from Russia and by that I do not mean people who were brought here as babies (ex. one of the Google's founders). Russians are reckless about laws. That is the impact of Brezhnevism era. I spent quite some time in US before shedding this heritage completely.
I have a feeling that pretty much all of the rest of the world (may be w. some exceptions in Europe) has more lax moral principles in business.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
> gmail's spam filtering beats Thunderbird's handily
And in this, we see an faint echo of the enormous power in the information that Google collects:
1) They have a lot more training data
2) They can make a comparative analysis to catch large batches of largely identical messages which arrive at their servers within short time periods
Some?
All but the most shady of mail providers will kill your account as soon as they realise your spamming, because we can't afford to be blacklisted and have e-mails bouncing for all our customers.
Once that happens, it's up to you to prove that what you were doing wasn't spamming. We can live without your £40/month, but we can't live without the ability to send outgoing e-mails.
I, too, have a Gmail account and get very little spam. Hooray for Google.
There isn't a *good* way to cold-call email. All unsolicited email is spam. In the travel agency's place, instead of spamming people, they could get off their fat arses and visit the companies where these people work, introduce themselves, and offer their services ... but that's actual WORK!
Or they can run ads, or host a local event, or help out with a local charity, or all those other wonderful ways to actually make yourself known. The "I'll sit on my fat ass and make tons of money off the innerweb" meme won't die, because people are fat, stupid, and lazy.
Kevin Smith on Prince
My former employer decided to start spamming even after meetings where I explained the dangers of spam, how it's unethical , etc, etc. They really wanted to do it, because they decided to listen to one person who had dollar signs in his eyes.
Long story short, I quit the job, but I had to deal with spam for about a month while I was looking for a different employer. Somehow it was my fault that we were blacklisted by most of the major ISPs and mail services. The IT director was too shortsighted to farm out the spamming to someone else.
Everything worked out great in the end, because I'm at a place now that would never spam and I'm working with bright people on some very cool projects.
So yeah, my advice is quit and tell him why you're quitting if he won't listen to your advice.
Of course! NDAs, like any contract, are only worth more than the paper they're on if you are willing to sue for breech of contract. Unfortunately, most small companies, including QuickLogic at the time, aren't in a financial position to fight an expensive legal battle. Lattice knew it. They took advantage of it.
Personally, I prefer to do business based on a handshake. The integrity of your business partners counts far more than the details of your business contract. If I can't take someone at their word, don't do business with him. The trick is figuring out which people you can trust.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
Wait. You shared your /customer list/ with a competitor as part of due diligence? I've never heard of doing that. Due diligence requires that they look at your books in some detail, yes, but it doesn't mean that you have to show them everything.
Nope, Lattice was angling for your customer list, pure and simple. My guess is that the offer on the table wasn't all that serious in the first place.
>> The trick is figuring out which people you can trust.
That's not a trick. It's easy. Trust no one.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Oh, definitely do something like the "accidental 'reply all'" strategy:
Hi George! I see that you decided to go ahead with the spam advertising approach despite the risks. More power to you. We've definitely dropped that idea... it is too likely to piss off our core of loyal clients.
We're still doing the 'traditional quality' thing: trying to arrange the best possible tour packages for each price point. It is not a 'get rich quick' approach, but we're all making a good living at doing what we like to do, and that counts for a lot.
Our company has decided to back off on those talks about some kind of partnership with your company. We think that our corporate values are too different from yours for that to work out, at least for now.
Looking forward to seeing you again at next year's trade show! If they have it in the same place, we could share lunch again at that italian restaurant with the excellent menu.
[Sign with title, company name, etc]
Also definitely move the mailing list into a database of some kind, so you can cross reference it with your client lists. If a significant portion of your clients are on their mailing list, then you might have a problem of some kind. You might also use this as one source for building targeted mailing lists, but it wouldn't be wise to use it directly. See next point.
Tell your boss that the people on this list have already seen junk email from the competitor and are likely to regard anything you send out as just more junk email, so normal spamming would actually be counter productive. This is especially true since undoubtedly other businesses are harvesting these addresses, and will be pumping out spam to these people.
My first reaction was, "Ugh! How annoying! Who are these jerks blowing our fax paper on a stupid ad for a useless product?" --And this was before Spam existed under that name as a real feature of our reality, which to me indicates that I just have a very low tolerance for any kind of social manipulation. But here's the thing. . .
All the women in our office got into this fluster of consumerist excitement. "Hundreds of different watch styles for cheap!" The building concourse was flooded with people looking for watches, like a flea market hopped up on caffeine, and when the day was over the girls were showing off two and three watches each, swapping them like trading cards and generally having a grand old time. Even some of the guys got sucked in. And I felt like an old sourpuss sticking to principal and wondering if it was the Human Race which was stupid, or if it was me. (That office job did that to me a great deal.)
But anyway. . , the point is that with the right level of care and planning, SPAM not only works, but it works really well.
Heck, I know a couple of people who forwarded that "Bill Gates is giving a hundred bucks to everybody who forwards this email" email. It made their day! Some people actually enjoy being pandered to like consumerist bovines. They are locked into the system and being advertised at is a major feature of that system which is not only expected by desired.
So yeah. The point is that ignorant apes are sometimes happy being ignorant apes. But I still wouldn't send out 1000 emails to potential travel clients, because in the massive noise filling the channel most will ignore the spam and people like me will blacklist his company.
Oh, and in case you're wondering, I decided that neither me nor the Human Race were wrong. There's just different types of people and different levels of awareness/expectation, and that's okay! People can self-annihilate themselves through ignorance if that's their predisposition. But for some reason office buildings seem to attract that brand of human, and I will die before I allow myself to work in cubicle land ever again. My own level of ignorance needs to be worked on in a different environment, or I'll simply interrupt the process by murdering a bunch of apes with too many cheap watches.
-FL
While the 'reply all' strategy is solid I don't agree with the suggested wording of the email. You start off chastising George for spamming when that is exactly what you are doing. If I received your email I'd believe you're a dishonest business person actively engaged in a lie. Which is made obvious by the fact that you received his email and were able to determine it was spammed to many people but somehow you're not bright enough to realize that the email you are sending is also going to the same list of people. To be dishonest and lie in a more convincing manner I think you need to avoid the mention of spam at all ;-)