New technology brings new ways to irritate potential customers

It used to be telemarketers were the root of all evil. You knew that every night, your dinner would be interrupted by someone calling to upgrade your phone to a new service you couldn’t live without or announce that you were randomly selected to win a grand prize if you only visited his or her time-share in Boca. Blessedly, no-call lists went into effect and most of the calls stopped.

Unfortunately, as technology has evolved, so have the ways irreverent marketers can reach us. I have to say, I’m amazed at the ingenuity. Now, instead of telemarketing calls, I get texts. Instead of email spam, I get Twitter spam. Facebook is wallpapered in ads and companies wanting to be my “friend” because I fit a profile.

The question becomes, should we do it just because we can? The latest example of Habitat including #hashtags in their Twitter messages so they’d fall in the top trending topics seems a bit unscrupulous. Tweeps hoping to catch up on the Iran crisis probably were a bit frustrated to find tweets about the latest furniture promotions in-store mixed in among their feeds. I, personally, have noticed a huge upswing in companies following me to get my attention (over 10% of my followers are now this type). Fortunately, I don’t use the auto-follow feature so I don’t see many of the tweets they’re hoping to catch me with.

CAN-SPAM rules prohibit marketers from randomly spamming email accounts and I expect regulations on texts, tweets, Facebook updates and even forum posts will not be far away. But rules and regulations will always lag technology and creativity.

While I see the direct marketing angle, social media really should be used to become part of customers’ community and generating conversation with them, not just another vehicle to talk at them as done through other vehicles. The beauty of social media is to allow businesses and their customers to relate on a more individual basis, not just to blast messages out. Time Warner and Comcast have done a great job just sitting back and listening to their customers then responding to their needs quickly – in many cases, even faster than those customers can get help via phone.

We’ve had clients ask us occasionally about these methods of reaching potential customers and we always say no. It’s just not worth the risk of alienating them when the potential gain of using social media correctly is so much greater. Hopefully, as marketers turn to their agencies for guidance they’ll start hearing the same response.