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Out of office autoresponders are a great thing. In some ways. If a client is trying to reach you about a particular aspect of a campaign, a notable development, a question about how to promote a new product etc, then it helps if they know that their account manager is out of the office this week, and who to contact instead.
However, if your out of office autoresponder is not ’smart’, then it will reply to every ezine, newsletter, client enquiry, spam email and so on, ad infinitum. The actuality of that is that you will undoubtedly make enemies with the very people you need to foster relationships with. Any by this, we are not talking about spambots or people who have bought your email address from some dodgy listserv seller.
If you want to know how to ensure that your Out of Office auto reply mechanism is keeping people on side rather than alienating them, the blog post linked to in this sentence is a MUST READ.
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Spamming Twitter is a no-no.
Even though Twitter has only a few days search capacity for previous Tweets (due to the monster amount of tweets that are written every minute, let alone day), there is no need at all to keep posting the same Tweet over and over again. Nor to pick on a trending topic and put those hashtags in if they are not relevant, as Habitat discovered!
Today, some plank who claims to be an SEO pro has spent the entire day spamming certain channels on Twitter. I cannot begin to imagine what that has done to any business opportunities he may have been seeking to gain, but I do know that several people have tracked down the culprit and as he is US-based are now taking matters into their own hands to get his ISP to disconnect him.
Repeatedly tweeting the same message is bound to get people’s backs up. Why do it? Unless you change the text every time, the only people who will see it are your followers (watch them unfollow, fast) and those scanning for/monitoring certain keywords – as I was.
Before you develop a social media strategy, and adopt tools where required to do so, make sure you test them and don’t do anything like automate repeat tweets that will undoubtedly gain you far more enemies than friends.
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For those who use Twitter regularly, you will know how useful the trends feature *can* be for spotting a fast developing topic or viral. However, as with all these things, there is a major downside. Real-time spam.
In order to make a tweet easy to find by those who will be interested in it, you add a hashtag #. This then groups all tweets about that subject into a ‘channel’. When a large number of users are all using the same hashtag, this topic can become a trend on Twitter.
For instance, during the recent Digital Britain summit #digitalbritain started to show on the trends as soon as Stephen Fry took to the platform and his many followers started to tweet with the #digitalbritain tag.
However, in order to disseminate their message to a wide audience, spammers have now taken to adding trending hashtags to their tweets, which is causing havoc as channels get clogged with spam and unrelated marketing messages.
Danny Sullivan’s recent blog post outlines the problems being felt by Search Engine Land, which also highlights how tweets that do not come from the quoted source (eg with a retweet or RT) can begin to affect branding, relationships with your community and so on.
Twitter will need to deal with this problem rapido. Recent live events have been increasingly affected by spam during the course of an event, and Twitter is an ideal medium for such events and conferences as it allows a multitude of virtual delegates to benefit from live streaming, commentary etc and brings an event to a far wider audience than is possible and affordable with a venue.
Whilst showing trending topics on Twitter does have its uses, especially for marketers working on viral campaigns, until the spam problem is resolved, then it would be better for Twitter to remove them.
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Until last week, with the growing popularity of this new blog, we were slowly but surely wasting more minutes of every day dealing with comment spam on the blog.
Spam is pervasive and pointless, as we all know. It can munch its way through hours of your time, whether in your email inbox, your blog comments or through your letter box.
Just a quick comment then and praise for akismet. Nice plug in. And it works. Spam gone in under 2 minutes today, as compared to a daily grind before that was increasingly irritating. Well done, guys!
I have just read a piece in our local business newspaper, written by a so-called online marketing expert, all about e-mail marketing.
It reminded me that as we approach Christmas, many companies will be looking to promote their products and services. Many will opt for an e-mail campaign, especially in times of recession where cuts must be made everywhere possible, and postage is one easy choice.
And these companies probably have little experience in e-mail marketing, so here is the first DONT! that this particular article missed out!
Before you send ANY emails to anyone, make sure that they have given you their email address for that purpose. Do not go out and buy an email list, because you are heading straight into the trap of sending out Unsolicited Commercial Email (aka spam).
Do not go searching through your inbox for email addresses for everyone and anyone who has ever contacted you with a view to sending them an email promoting your hot Xmas product. That is spamming.
The full Privacy and Communications Directive laying out what can and cannot be done is here, and everyone who uses email, or many other forms of communications, should have read it.
Although it is rare that we hear of a UK company being ‘policed’ over spam, it is not necessarily the legal effect that will be felt most soundly by your company, but the PR ripple effect, that is often unseen, and you may be unaware of.
Every individual who has to delete an unwanted email will, at the very least, take in the name of the company who sent it, even if very briefly as they hit the delete button. This means you have just had your name or brand associated with the Trash Box!
Probably not quite the effect you intended with your carefully crafted, beautifully laid out email. But it is the effect achieved, and you should avoid it at all costs.
Today’s lesson is: send your emails to those who have opted in to receive them. They are your willing target audience.
