Social media the Home Depot way

I’ve been following Richard the Cat on Twitter for a while. It’s the story of a family and their trials and tribulations with their yard as told by their cat.
The twitter feed (and Richard’s tumblr) are a product of the Home Depot marketing department. And it’s great. Richard has awesome comments on his humans and their struggle to create a happy yard. The tweets are low key and not overly home depot branded, but every Richard tweet I see, I think about the yard and things we might need from Home Depot.
And, of course, who on the internet doesn’t love a cat meme?
To my mind this is one of the better examples of brand social media. There is a theme. The tweets and tumblr does remind followers of the brand – Richard is an orange cat after all. The process is participatory, followers can upload cat photos on the Tumblr and tweet with Richard on Twitter.
Social media is social; a two way street. A lot of brands fail with the social part in that they treat it as a one way street. Home Depot doesn’t do that with Richard.

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Social networks and bulk email

There’s been a bit of a commotion on Twitter and over at J Caldwell’s blog about Al’s reaction to someone harvesting his address off LinkedIn and then adding that email address to his company’s marketing / newsletter database. Al objected to getting the mail, the person who did this shot back that it wasn’t spam, there was lots of arguing both over twitter and on the blog post.
This also recently happened when a well known email marketer took all 500+ of his Linked In contacts (including me) and added them to his corporate Christmas card list. His behaviour also created a bit of a stir, although it was a little less public.
That mailing was interesting, because a number of people who received the card thought this was the Best Use of Email, EVER! Some of them went so far as to opine “How could ANYONE not like this mail? What are they, Scrooge?” Well, actually, I found the mail irrelevant and a bit annoying. I have to admit I would have been a lot less annoyed if I knew this was a one time thing. However, in order to comply with CAN SPAM he included an opt-out. Which lead to some head scratching: have I been added to their full list? Am I going to get their newsletter from now on? Do I have to opt-out? What was he thinking?
Watching both of the above situations go down I have come up with a list of things you must consider when sending bulk mail to people who have connected with you on social networks.

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Is social media a laughing matter?

I really love my job, but sometimes I miss academia, research and science. One of the ways I stay somewhat connected to that world is reading Scienceblogs (and the new Scientopia site). A few weeks ago my worlds collided when one of the librarians at Scienceblogs posted a Friday funny: 5 signs you’re talking to a social media douchebag.

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Social invading everything

I discovered, inadvertently, that there is a business networking site modeled after dating site. If you’re selling something you go on the site and register as a seller. If you’re buying something you go on the site and register as a buyer. Buyers can post RFIs and sellers can respond.
Decent enough business model, they’ve even fleshed it out so the site itself acts as an invoicing and billing mechanism.
That’s how I discovered it, one of our very large international telco customers decided they wanted to use this site for billing. Many large telcos expect vendors to use their proprietary site, so I wasn’t that surprised when they asked. And, given they’re international being able to bill them electronically just means I don’t have to remember to use the international stamps.
At the behest of our customer, I signed up at the website. It’s like most social networking sites, create a profile, categorize yourself, make everything public. The thing is, I don’t want to use this site to find new customers. I am just using it because one of my current customers is expecting it. Don’t get me wrong, Abacus is a great product and our customers are extremely happy with it, but it’s pretty niche. It’s not something that’s going to be searched for on a generic website.
I thought that when I set my profile to private that would be some sort of signal to keep me out of the main directory of the site. This morning I realized that wasn’t true when I got a bunch of emails telling me about all these companies looking for “business software” (the closest category I could find).
Getting a bunch of irrelevant mail was annoying enough. Even worse, there was no unsub link in the email. Eventually, I discovered an entire page of email options that were not made clear to me up front. I also sent mail to support and suggested that they talk to their lawyers to clarify whether their opt-out option was consistent with CAN SPAM. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t, but I am not a lawyer.
To the company’s credit, they did have good support and my questions through support were answered in a timely fashion. One of their support reps even called me on the phone to clarify what it was that I wanted to happen and walk me through their email options. She was very upfront about yes, they opted everyone in to all the mail at the very beginning of the process. “We’re like match.com for businesses!”
I’m sure there are some businesses that will find this service to be great. But it’s not what I want or need. Despite the fact that their support was so helpful, I don’t have a great feeling about this company. It seems a bit dishonest that I thought I was signing up for a billing portal, but was actually joining “match.com for businesses. Why couldn’t they make that clear in the 7 emails in 2 days “inviting” me to sign up?
I know I’m a little more sensitive to bad mailing processes than most people, but this was quite an unpleasant experience from the multiple identical emails and reminders before I signed up to the irrelevant stuff I got afterwards.

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