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How To Convince My Boss Not To Spam?
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Jun 17, 2008 02:37 AM
from the engendering-ill-will dept.
from the engendering-ill-will dept.
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?"
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Submission: How to convince my boss not to spam? by Anonymous Coward
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my $0.02 (Score:5, Informative)
I reckon you've got a few options:
Ok, so you're dealing with a sales-focussed person here, the only one likely to carry any weight is going to be last one and even then, you may be onto a losing streak. Assuming this person controls your pay packet, you're either going to have to put up a token resistance and then keep your mouth shut; or perhaps if you have the option, consider whether you want to be working for someone like that...
Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Funny)
also, get out
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Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Funny)
Aren't we the personal swiss army knife of social engineered DoS attacks? (Post it, we slash it down.)
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Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Funny)
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You're modded "Funny"... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Interesting)
This technique is proven!
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Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Interesting)
Lattice e-mailed our customer list to every one of their regional sales managers. Let's face it... business is war. It's not pretty out there.
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Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Interesting)
Email all the customers on the list, telling them that the competitor has exposed their email address by their actions, and proposing that you supply their travel needs while guaranteeing that every email communication will be sent individually.
Ethical (you're exposing bad practice on the part of your competitor) and good business.
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Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Interesting)
Best I could do was send the email in smaller batches (10 000) that would limit the fallout and just pretend I'd sent the full 500 000 emails in the batch that would be just enough to piss the ISP off and get them to threaten to shut the connection and scare them into not doing it again but not enough to force an immediate termination.
Bosses can be stupid.
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Tell him tt's a trap (Score:5, Interesting)
If you boss spams like this, there exists the possibility that the other firm have taken this elementary precaution, which may be anything from seriously embarrassing to legally expensive.
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Re:Tell him tt's a trap (Score:5, Interesting)
There are even dummy addresses in the white and yellow pages to prevent unscrupulous businesses sending the phone books to somewhere cheap to get them copy typed into a database. If you ring the number no one answers but your caller ID is recorded. If you send them mail thats checked too. How do I know this. A company I used to work for got caught doing just this.
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Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Informative)
I realise you probably were trying to be humorous, but you never know who might get the wrong idea reading these threads. Best to state the obvious anyway...
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Point him at Seth Godin's books (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.sethgodin.com/permission/ [sethgodin.com]
Seth Godin is the marketing guru who advised google on how to succeed in business. he knows his stuff, and he is MASSIVELY anti spam.
Tell your boss he needs to read the guys book before he does something that could wreck his business.
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Re:Point him at Seth Godin's books (Score:5, Informative)
Dude, PHBs don't read anything that isn't in cartoon form. I think that's even a prerequisite qualification of applying for a management job. The application forms are usually submitted in crayon, too.
- David Stein
/ reads too much dilbert
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Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Spamhaus (Score:5, Informative)
Spam is filtered (Score:5, Insightful)
Teach him (Score:5, Interesting)
Enter it here (don't visit from work, do it from a web cafe and behind 7 proxies)
http://www.spamyourenemies.com/ [spamyourenemies.com]
After a while he'll go off the idea. You might want to recommend Thunderbird to him.
Re:Teach him (Score:5, Funny)
I guess I'm not too popular.. (Luckily I use gmail for my domain, and out of ~2000 monthly spam, only 2 hit my inbox. And only 1 false positive to date)
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The power of information (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Re:Teach him (Score:5, Insightful)
I, too, have a Gmail account and get very little spam. Hooray for Google.
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Explain why spam is bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Subscribe him (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Subscribe him (Score:5, Funny)
Problem solved....
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Point out the negative effects (Score:5, Insightful)
* 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.
Re:Point out the negative effects (Score:5, Interesting)
I doubt it. If the competitor is able to send mailings without being blacklisted , then there are no honeypot addresses in there. It is not likely that enough recipients will take the effort to report the mail to spamcop.net (are there any other blacklists based on manual reporting? Is the spamcop blacklist widely used anyway?) to get the sender blacklisted. At most, some individual Bayesian filters may become more sensitive to the name of the company and travel-related spam, although I'm not sure how hotmail/gmail/yahoo exactly deal with user-reported spam.
The submitter works for a travel agency. Plenty of competition; the chance that the potential customer comes to them is small anyway.
I'm afraid that, however unethical this spamming would be, the risk of getting in trouble is rather small.
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Re:Point out the negative effects (Score:5, Funny)
* Your mail server will be added to blacklists.
Make sure this happens
* Complaints may reach your web site's hosting provider, who may take it offline.
Make sure this happens
* Some recipients are likely to be annoyed and may decide to never do business with your company.
Make sure he receives some email telling him why customers are upset
* 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.
Make sure someone grasses him up to the appropriate authorities.
Oh, and make sure your CV is up to date.
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When is spam not spam... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Business is war,weakling ! The business Gods RAGE (Score:5, Interesting)
You need to separate your hate of spam from the realities of business:
Ethical, kind people go bankrupt.
I have my own company, and if this happened to me I would be working this gift from God HARD.
That's incorrect (Score:5, Insightful)
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_
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Re:Business is war,weakling ! The business Gods RA (Score:5, Funny)
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this will go completely against the grain here (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:this will go completely against the grain here (Score:5, Insightful)
I usually get hired to do exactly what the OP wants to do: Tell my boss why some of his ideas ain't so bright. A boss who wants his employees to "do his biddings", without objection or at least suggestion, hopefully has some large corporation around him to fend off his bloopers or he'll face bankrupcy soon (another reason to go look for a new job if he does). Managers rarely care or even know about the subtle social problems technical solutions create, and the smart ones are quite thankful when you keep them from putting their foot into it. Most do care about their "face" with their peers, or do you think he wants to hear "oh, so that was the tard that flooded our mailserver" next time his superior grants him the favor of inviting him to a golf game with his buddies?
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Re:this will go completely against the grain here (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone who doesn't stand up for their principles and raise their objections and put up a fight when it's something they really care about isn't a worthwhile employee. And someone who runs off like a little hurt puppy and quits without trying to change my mind first when I want to do something they think is wrong definitively isn't a worthwhile employee.
If I wanted "yes men", then the job ads would say so.
And so far that's an attitude I've shared with every manager I've had.
I've had heated arguments with every single one of them over things I thought were idiotic ideas. None of them have had a problem with that, because I've always kept it strictly about the issues at hand. If any of them HAD given me a hard time about standing up to them, then I probably would have left, as it would be a sure sign they're idiots.
If you seriously feel you were "hired to do his bidding", then I'm certainly glad you're not working for me; I don't want minions, I want professionals.
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Simple.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
Obvious really (Score:5, Insightful)
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
You offer an alternative solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Problems with "advertising" (Score:5, Informative)
Most people react badly to unsolicited emailed advertisements. It is likely that some of these people are already customers or potential customers. This will dissuade them from choosing your company in the future.
If any customers are in the EU, you may have a data protection liability. Even if you don't, at least some people will respond requesting to be removed from the mailing list, which is something that will have to be dealt with.
It's very likely to be against the terms and conditions of your ISP.
It is possible that you will be blacklisted by the recipients ISPs (unlikely if he does this once)
There may be some legal ramifications for taking advantage of an obvious mistake by the other company. Even just a baseless legal threat would take time and money to deal with.
Re:You can't. Spamming them will make the company (Score:5, Informative)
Use the information, just don't abuse it. Spam is quick and dirty, but a poor substitute for the elbow grease of real salesmanship.
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Re:You can't. Spamming them will make the company (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (
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Re:You can't. Spamming them will make the company (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact is that given the quality of their messages - they weren't V1gara Ci1ais, they weren't scam attempts, and in fact they were pretty carefully targeted based on what industry vertical you were in - they actually had a pretty high response rate. For most campaigns they saw 10-15% response, and they had sales reps personally contact each of those responders (now known as leads).
The calculated lead-to-sale value for email campaigns based a floating 6-month average was around $1,600 (the software cost anywhere from $10,000 to $150,000 depending on which modules you purchased with it, and including 1 year of support maintenance - many customers actually signed on for many years, but it's not considered part of the initial sale). I don't know what the percentage was for lead-to-sale, they didn't track it that way.
So for every person who filled out a contact form from following the link in an email, they made an average of $1,600. When you're sending 10,000 emails for a single campaign, and you have a 10% response rate, each of which is worth $1,600, that campaign profited $16,000. It's hard to argue against this.
In addition, many of those contacts turn into sales later and aren't tracked as a email-to-sale because the email only enabled the relationship with the sales rep to open up, and the sales rep was able to make an independent sale months or possibly years later which wouldn't have been possible without the email sparking an interest.
The company wasn't interested in the moral implications. They weren't interested in the legality of it so long as they adhered to the bare minimum that was required to be legal. They were interested in this thing which provided 100-fold plus return on investment so long as they didn't try to wring to much out of it or otherwise abuse it.
Of course they had to honor opt-out requests, and they did. But they received fewer opt-outs for each campaign than they received leads; and often times the leads they received weren't from the person who received the email, but were actually a colleague who forwarded the message to their coworker or friend; they might actually have added more new recipients each campaign than opted out.
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Re:Depends. (Score:5, Insightful)
You agreed to it.
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Re:Use a sex / romance analogy (Score:5, Funny)
So you're saying there's a chance it might work?
Hmmm..
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