Digital Common Sense

I recently shared in the pleasure Alec Saunders enjoyed receiving some unsolicited mail from a PR group about a service offering. He wrote a follow-up note here. Alec views is as spam, and I don’t disagree. On the other hand, in my role as an analyst, blogger, and generally outspoken pain in the ass, I take most of these unsolicited emails with a grain of salt. They quickly go to the bit bucket without comment.

As noted in Alec’s comments, anything we say is exposure for them and exposure is good.

Today I got a different one. I’m curious how many of my fellow bloggers got an obviously canned email with the subject “Awesome blog” today. The email message contained a cutesy video film strip and a logo. The message itself was pretty content free. No, check that. It was a zero content message.

This message was so blatantly content free that even Outlook’s terribly weak spam filter caught it and tossed it in the spam box. I don’t know about you, but the only thing I ever do with my spam folder is empty it. If your message lands there, I won’t go wade through it. People I want to talk with know enough to write messages that don’t look like spam.

I did review this message because the sender called and left me a “you have to check this out.” voice mail. So I granted some leeway and read the message. I clicked the video link to see what was there, and frankly, I got a nice cutesy video that was againm content free. All it said was you will want in on the ground floor and have to check this out.

Yes, there were links on the video page I could have investigated, but here’s a clue. Just like I had to deal with selling to executives, you’ve got a window of opportunity to pitch me. It’s a small window. In the real world, we call it the elevator pitch. Win my interesting in an elevator ride or lose me forever.

Today’s example utterly failed in the elevator pitch. I didn’t click links. I’m not interested in fishing for more information. And the next email will languish in the spam folder briefly before it finds the bit bucket.

No mention of the company here. Sorry, you get no karma from me at all. I’m not interested enough to post the name and encourage further dialog. I’ll remember the company name and always look a bit askance if it pops up in the future. One day, if it gains traction, I might open my mind, but until then, your poorly executed elevaor pitch flew right by, simply wasting ten minutes of my time. And though you have my number and left voice mail, I’m not interested in a follow up call. Sorry.

Technorati Tags: Bad OR, elevator pitch, how to not win business

Filed by Ken at 2:47 pm under Technology