Last night I had a knee jerk reaction to a spam email I received on MySpace. The product he was promoting wasn’t offensive, but his timing caught me at a time where I felt the need to go into lecture mode (whereas I usually just delete and move on). Here’s the back story:

I was catching up on tweets on Twitter from earlier yesterday and saw a great conversation among some of my Twitter pals about Facebook Spam and building relationships and wished I’d been there live to put in my two cents.

Honestly, I thought relationship building was common sense, and said as much hours later on Twitter as a general tweet…

Then I get the “ca-ching” notification that I have email on MySpace from someone who isn’t even a MySpace friend 10 minutes later while journaling. The note reads as follows:

—-

“My name is *******, I don’t know your situation or anything like that. I would like to tell you a little bit about me. I work from home and sell discount health programs, my Company Ameriplan has been around since 1992. We have Dental, Vision, Prescription, Chiropractic, Medical, and many more plan that can save you hundreds of dollars a month. These programs range anywhere from 14.95 to 59.95 a month, We also have a 100% satisfaction guarantee that comes with membership….This is my ..web page.. so you can see the product and better understand the company and what we could have to offer you .

Thank you for your time,
XXXXXXXX”

To which I tersely respond:

“XXXXX, I hope you’ll take my advice. You might get higher conversions if you do:

Very Quick Old-School Internet Marketing Tip- Find your target market (do a key word search, use pay per click and article marketing), build relationships with them (by inviting them to a free 7 part e-course, for example), and then MAYBE, pitch your product to them.

I’m not in your target market; I don’t know you so your message is SPAM–but rather than report you, I thought I’d just educate instead.

Remember the metaphor: Most folks would rather date first before getting married!

Carol”

Dude is really clueless. His reply:

“explain to me please this is my first type of sales pitch”

Yikes. I guess I really do take for granted what people know (or more accurately, DON‘T know). I didn’t reply last night, as it was after midnight, though I figured I’d feel more generous this morning. But look at the presumption that he’s entitled to more education from me and I don’t even know him.

I had planned this morning to reply all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed by just referring him to Stephen Pierce’s free internet marketing book, but guess what! His MySpace account has been deleted. No big surprise there. I guess someone else was even crankier than I was last night.

Hopefully he’ll do some investigating on his own. Those outdated sales techniques were obsolete even when they were popular for my personality (says the girl who suffered through trying to sell Electrolux vacuums door to door ages ago and hated every minute of it).

So that’s that.

–Carol Dickson-Carr

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 7:46 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, Social Network News, Web Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.