How To Convince My Boss Not To Spam? 475
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?"
You can't. Spamming them will make the company $$ (Score:3, Insightful)
Spam is filtered (Score:5, Insightful)
None really. (Score:1, Insightful)
Its probably safe to assume all of those potential customers are not looking for a new, erm, provider (?). If this is the case, then pissing them off by spamming them results in no real loss, and any of those stupid potential customers that actually listens to the spam and considers your company is a potential gain. So, at the end of the day, there is nothing to lose, and much to possibly gain.
Somehow, I don't think any argument you make is going to convince your boss.
Explain why spam is bad (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
Depends. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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)
Re:Business is war,weakling ! The business Gods RA (Score:1, Insightful)
wtf? (Score:4, Insightful)
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)
Re:When is spam not spam... (Score:2, Insightful)
Contacting the company who made the mistake would be a lot better.
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?
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.
Re:Depends. (Score:5, Insightful)
You agreed to it.
Re:Business is war,weakling ! The business Gods RA (Score:3, Insightful)
And if I had any business with your company, that would be the end of it.
You would get reported for spamming; if it continued, you would get sued, and my business would go elsewhere.
Then again, I wouldn't do business with the original moron sending all the contacts in the CC: field either.
Ethical or at least semi-ethical behaviour can give you an advantage here.
Someone suggested, for instance, replying to everyone (for good measure, put them in the BCC: field) and making a relatively subtle ad out of it.
I would actually make it a little spam lecture, explaining why this should never be done, and directly letting the competitor know that I have a list of his potential customers which I am not going to spam further. With apologies to everyone reading this as an unsolicited message, but it's an important matter and they will not hear from me again anyway.
Make it all sound not only intelligent, but funny too, and you'll make people laugh, and thus likely to read it through. Some may then decide to click on the link in your signature or simply reply. If they do, it is them contacting you.
I've done it a few times, when an occasional moronic spammer sent me and a hundred other people a shady MLM business offer. I analyzed the hell out of it, cussed at him just because he was a moron, explained every single detail, including who he worked for though he conveniently failed to mention it (a sthey always do), and it got me a few laughs. People who were bothered by the mail were encouraged at the very beginning to delete it immediately, so I'm fairly sure I had not made a pest out of myself.
Of course, it was private mail, so no business contacts resulted from it. In business mail, kindly do refrain from cussing.
You can exploit your competitions's mistakes and weaknesses. It's part of doing business.
Employing the same strategy that youu found to be their weakness is simply moronic.
Ethics? (Score:1, Insightful)
As an employee, a person has a contractual obligation to perform all reasonable tasks as set out in the employment contract. In addition, every member of society has a moral/social obligation (and very possibly a legal obligation (duty of care)) to ensure that they take reasonable measures to ensure that their colleagues (which includes their supervisors) do not expose the company to unreasonable risk nor act in an illegal or unethical manner.
By advising the OP to shaddup and lump it, you're advising an unethical course of action.
I think the OP has done the right thing by consulting the peer group for advice. That advice seems to be "Present your boss with a list of all the reasons against spamming and suggest the plan is cancelled." By doing so the OP would A. be acting responsibly and ethically and B. covering their backside in case the boss foolishly goes ahead with the plan.
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 (
Re:Simple.... (Score:4, Insightful)
You're modded "Funny"... (Score:5, Insightful)
Murder (Score:3, Insightful)
Spammers run the risk of being brutally murdered [slashdot.org] which I think is also somewhat bad for business..
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_
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.
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
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.
Re:Spamhaus (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Spam makes MONEY (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyway. The reason your boss should not do it is not because it's immoral, but because your IT staff and company does not have the technical experience to do it right.
Doing it right means: avoiding blowing complaint thresholds with receiving ISPs, setting up a complaint loop and unsubscribing quickly, not burning out your IPs, having multiple clean IPs to send from, having someone to manage relations with ISPs and spam organizations, understanding the relationship between # of complaints and sending volumne, and understanding the effect of attrition on list size and the need to resupply it with new leads.
Realize this is only the scratch of the surface. Successfully sending email at high volume is complicated. You're risking losing your ISP contract, getting all your IPs listed as spam sources, and destroying your reputation in your industry. These are difficult things to achieve for those who have experience with sending commercial bulk email. I will tell you right now, you do not have the knowledge to it right.
Instead, you will probably pimp out your email list to a corporation that specializes in sending email. It will simply things greatly, sure, and they will assume the delivery risks and you will cut them a hefty profit share, but understand many of those providers use employ very sleazy techniques. They often skirt legality by playing semantic games with CANSPAM and other laws. Also, sometimes they rely on extremely large numbers of hosts (such as Datran) and actively pursue methods to break through spam filters using various forms of text and markup for the email content. Other times, they contract out the dirty work to illegal bot networks which perform the actual delivery. Some may even pay ISPs to get Inbox delivery, cutting back on net profit.
Using the wrong sending provider could also mean losing editorial control of what gets sent to your list. They may slam it with general offers, totally unrelated to your product. They may exert extreme pressure on you to do so, which could unnecessarily piss off your client base. They won't be satisfied with hitting up your users once a week, they will SLAM them 3-5 times a day. They don't care about pissing your clients off. They can always burn out your list and move on to the next list, leaving you to deal with the aftermath.
Are there ways to send SPAM, or rather commercial bulk email, to your list and stay clean? Yes, there is. Believe it or not, some people WANT your email. If your boss still wants to continue with it, fight very hard for the following:
Re:Problems with "advertising" (Score:3, Insightful)
But this is hardly an untargeted list - I would expect the response rate to be significant.
Bottom line is that this is a non-issue for a small company - mildly annoying a few thousand people in exchange for say a 1% conversion rate is a no brainer in a business where you make a large amount on each sale.
True, but chances of actually getting into trouble are vanishingly small.
Again, very very small chance of any problems, and anyway it's not exactly difficult to get a new ISP.
It's such a small scale operation that the chances of appearing on anyone's radar are remote.
Assumes they hear about it, and want to make a noise about the fact that they are incompetent when it comes to securing their customers data.
Bottom line is, it makes a great deal of sense from a business point of view. Sure you can argue against it on ethical grounds, but trying to argue against it from a business point of view involves a lot of wishful thinking.
Re:my $0.02 (Score:2, Insightful)
More to the point, people *really* hate spam. If a current customer gets the spammed messages, he/she may suddenly decide to tell a thousand of his/her closest friends what a bad business your company is. Reputation damage is *very* hard to fix. {ProfJonathan}
Re:Teach him (Score:5, Insightful)
I, too, have a Gmail account and get very little spam. Hooray for Google.
Re:this will go completely against the grain here (Score:3, Insightful)
You got hired to do his bidding
Nuremberg defence [wikipedia.org], anyone?
PS OMG GODWIN!
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.
Just quit (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Turn his spam filter off for a day (Score:3, Insightful)
The best way to convince somebody (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me tell you how this goes. Somebody gets an idea that seems really neat. They see all kinds of benefits to this idea. Now you come in and decide to convince them it's really a bad idea. You each without thinking take up your debate club roles, him arguing the affirmative, you arguing the negative. Only in this debate, the opposing team is the judge.
It gets worse. This kind of thing gets emotional, because once somebody is enchanted with an idea, all those good things he imagines as a result seem to be within his grasp. You'll the one who is bent on taking all that away. It's an amazingly stupid attitude, if you think about it, but we all have it, hardwired in.
So, trust me, you you don't want to try to convince your boss not to do this. What you want to do is inform him. This means you must be totally fair, objective, balanced, and in no way an advocate of anything other than two things: having a complete plan for dealing with the results of the course of action, and knowing what the alternative courses of action entail.
The boss might even be right. If you aren't prepared for that possibility, you can't do this.
One thing is certain: if you plant the seeds of doubt in his mind, he'll look at those doubts as weeds. If he owns those doubts, he's more likely to let them bear fruit.
Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not a trick. It's easy. Trust no one.
Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:my $0.02 (Score:3, Insightful)
I worked in an office once during the time when... (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:my $0.02 (Score:5, Insightful)
Check your ISP's TOS (Score:3, Insightful)
Your company probably gets Internet connectivity from an ISP, and possibly has that ISP or a dedicated mail service provider handling e-mail. Check the Terms of Service. They probably contain language about unsolicited bulk e-mail. Bring up this point and ask for guidance from the corporate counsel as to what steps, if any, you need to take to run the requested campaign without violating contracts the company's signed and putting their Internet and mail at risk. Let counsel handle the rest.
Re:my $0.02 (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah. It says you're a SPAMMER! (Score:3, Insightful)
Period.
I don't care if it _is_ "targeted".
If you're selling something I happen to be looking for, you'll immediately disqualify yourself by sending me spam. I don't care if you're the market leader, the maker of the best thing since sliced bread, or what!
Fscking marketroids.
WHEN are you gonna get the fact that my incoming mail is NOT your advertising billboard?!?