Industrial Spam

I'm sure the folks at morpheusmedia won't mind my copying a post on their recent industrial spam blog. Great topic.

Hi, for confidentiality sake I won’t put my name up but you can see my email of course ;)

Industrial spam really concerns me. I completed a freelance job recently for someone who is sending thousands of emails out and apparently, in many cases, sending them over and over to the same people. I was really uncomfortable with this when I heard about it.

I gather the idea is to both give people a heads-up about their service, but it is also a war of attrition. If I am correct about who their target audience for this spam is, the primary reason they are getting away with few complaints is that the recipients have indicated in another forum an interest in the topic that the business service caters for. It’s a good guess many would be intrigued or at least sympathetic enough with the theme not to object.

Those who will violently object in a reply email rarely follow that up by making a formal complaint to a governing authority.

So, this comes down to an issue of ethics in part. Is the company branding as socially responsible? If they are then how do they justify their industrial spam against the known backdrop of increasing consumer resistance and objection to the practice.

Just because they can?