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How NOT to react to spam complaints

January 9, 2012 by Dennis Dayman

1/10/2012 UPDATE: His Twitter account doesn’t exist anymore. *hrm*

I thought the readership would like to see this one.

I think it goes without saying that many of you here know it is NOT best to taunt or make fun of a user when they ask to be unsubscribed or complain to you about a certain communication. This is especially true if you spam them without permission.

Today I ran into such an problem when I was spammed via Twitter. See: https://twitter.com/#!/Aniekanokono/status/156433672965341184

I don’t know of Aniekan Okono (CEO) nor do I know anything about or have a relationship with ziliot.com. To be honest I haven’t seen to many Twitter spams to my account recently (maybe I ignore them). I of course took note of this spam and posted back thanks, but no thanks for the spam and I like many users reported the spam to the abuse team at Twitter. “How to report spam on Twitter”

To my surprise and within minutes the “CEO” of this company began to berate and make funny of me publicly because I simply did not want his social media spam. See here: https://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/from%3AAniekanokono%20to%3Addayman

Now who in their right mind would be so crazy to berate someone especially if they are trying to drive membership to their company. As a part time investor in small companies I’m not sure many others would find his actions appropriate and becoming of a CEO and growing company.

Anyways, my point being here is if you look over time best common practices around digital communications like the MAAWG Sender Best Communications Practices you will see a common theme in which they recommend that anyone who receives such complaints or spam requests that they “Immediately honor any and all abuse-related complaints regarding an email list subscription as if they were an unsubscribe request”. I would even go as far and say this sort of thing doesn’t pass muster with the Code of Ethics and Standards of Conduct for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. You’ve also probably heard that you shouldn’t make contact with the person to try and change their minds or argue with them about how your content was appropriate for them, or how they are wrong to unsubscribe from your message. Just bad things.

Just imagine it for a moment if your big brand took every complaint personally? If you attacked every person when they complained? Doesn’t look right or good does it? Face the music folks, sometimes people don’t want your messaging. Please don’t take offense to that as Aniekan apparently did. Not all digital communications are relevant and targeted properly. This game is about QUALITY over QUANTITY.

Anyways, I did notice that he did spam most of the day the same message over and over. https://twitter.com/#!/Aniekanokono/. Does Twitter spamming work? I would think not. Most users like myself just block accounts that do such.

I’m interested to hear from others if they think I’m wrong about this, or they recommend something else to be done when it comes to dealing with complaints, or have the times changed and I don’t know about it.

Spamming doesn’t pay and nether does attacking a compliant. Maybe he will post a comment here and berate me as well.

-Dennis

Eloqua
Don’t Just Send, Deliver (with permission)