Social marketing

The following showed up in my mailbox a few moments ago
I commented to Steve that social marketing was about connecting with people, and businesses aren’t people. That’s why social marketing for B2B is hard: there are no people involved. Or, as he pointed out, B2B in the social space is bot to bot marketing.

Of course, there aren’t literal bots behind most brands. In the B2C space, brands have cultivated a social media presence that personifies the business in a way that appeals to their consumers. But that’s the brand projecting onto people and responding to people. When a business tries to connect to a business, it’s just two puppets talking.
Sure, there are small businesses where there isn’t the case. But generally businesses aren’t on social media to consume marketing. They’re on social media to generate marketing. They aren’t targets because you can’t market to a puppet.

But…

Of course, consumers aren’t on social media to absorb marketing, either, but there’s a bigger pool there. Even more importantly, most people on social media are there to relax and be entertained. They’re not thinking necessarily about what they need, they’re just out to be, well, social. In this context, they’re open to marketing and the right brand personification.
Business folks are either on social media as brands and have goals and work to do so they’re focused on their goals. Or they’re on social media to interact with colleagues or keep up with industry news. In this situation they may be open to marketing. But, the pool of potential customers is smaller. Brands don’t have to just find the right company, they also have to find the right person inside that company.

Still…

This isn’t to say businesses can’t successfully market to other businesses in the social space. They do. But they’re still marketing to people. Social media is about a social environment. Treating it solely as an advertising space misses the point of social media and risks alienating potential markets.

Email?

This does apply to email as well. Even when you’re marketing in the B2B space, you’re still contacting people. And the rules of permission still apply – no matter how hard B2B marketers try and tell us B2B is different. B2B isn’t different. If anything permission is much more important. Consumer mail providers are constrained in their filtering because they have a diverse user base. Businesses are less constrained because the user base is more uniform and there is no expectation that the business is going to let employees do anything they want with email.
While there are hundreds, if not thousands, of companies selling business addresses, it’s not OK. You’re still entering someone’s space, you need to respect that. Many B2B marketers don’t. And those of us who are your targets owe you nothing when you annoy us.

Mike might be spamming, but why?
Marketing automation plugins facilitate spam

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Parasites hurt email marketing

As a small business owner I am a ripe target for many companies. They buy my address from some lead generation firm, or they scrape it off LinkedIn, and they send me a message that pretends to be personalized but isn’t really.
“I looked at your website… we have a list of email addresses to sell you.”
“We offer cold calling services… can I set up a call with you?”
“I have scheduled a meeting tomorrow so I can tell you about our product that will solve all your technical issues and is also a floor wax.”
None of these emails are anything more than spam. They’re fake personalized. There’s no permission. On a good day they’ll have an opt out link. On a normal day they might include an actual name.
These are messages coming to an email address I’ve spent years trying to protect from getting onto mailing lists. I don’t do fishbowls, I’m careful about who I give my card to, I never use it to sign up for anything. And, still, that has all been for naught.
I don’t really blame the senders, I mean I do, they’re the ones that bought my address and then invested in business automation software that sends me regular emails trying to get me to give them a phone number. Or a contact for “the right person at your business to talk to about this great offer that will change your business.”
The real blame lies with the people who pretend that B2B spam is somehow not spam. Who have pivoted their businesses from selling consumer lists to business lists because permission doesn’t matter when it comes to businesses. The real blame lies with companies who sell “marketing automation software” that plugs into their Google Apps account and hijacks their reputation to get to the inbox. The real blame lies with list cleansing companies who sell list buyers a cleansing service that only hides the evidence of spamming.
There are so many parasites in the email space. They take time, energy and resources from large and small businesses, offering them services that seem good, but really are worthless.
The biologically interesting thing about parasites, though, is that they do better if they don’t overwhelm the host system. They have to stay small. They have to stay hidden. They have to not cause too much harm, otherwise the host system will fight back.
Email fights back too. Parasites will find it harder and harder to get mail delivered in any volume as the host system adapts to them. Already if I look in my junk folder, my filters are correctly flagging these messages as spam. And my filters see a very small portion of mail. Filtering companies and the business email hosting systems have a much broader view and much better defenses.
These emails annoy me, but I know that they are a short term problem.  As more and more businesses move to hosted services, like Google Apps and Office365 the permission rules are going to apply to business addresses as well as consumer addresses. The parasites selling products and services to small business owners can’t overwhelm email. The defenses will step in first.
 

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Targeted marketing done badly

There was quite a bit of content I cut out on my rant about parasites in the email ecosystem earlier this week. I had whole section on people who ask to connect on LinkedIn and then immediately send a pitch or scrape your address and add it to their marketing automation software and start spamming. Generally, the only reason I will drop someone off LinkedIn is because they do this.
envelopes
Today, one of the deliverability mailing lists has been hopping over spam many folks in the industry received. The discussion started off simple enough, someone said “Is <companyname> spamming the industry?” People immediately chimed in that yeah, it did appear so.
A few people said they’d gotten the message and thought it was personal and were disappointed it wasn’t. Others weren’t sure why they were chosen to receive this message, or why some of their co-workers were chosen. A few of us didn’t get them. I didn’t.
This is a great example of marketing that was reasonably well planned, but a total fail for not knowing their audience. The product in question is an anti-abuse product. The company wants to reach people in the anti-abuse industry. They go off and find people in the anti-abuse industry and send them an email. Mail that seems personalized. It was a perfectly reasonable email. It asked questions and did get some people to engage with it by replying. They even appear to have done A/B testing on subject lines.
All solid marketing decisions. All great things to do.
But, the anti-abuse community is small, particularly the ESP anti-abuse community. We talk on mailing lists, IRC, LinkedIn, Facebook and Slack – and those are just the places I’m connected to. I’m sure there are other meeting places. The fact is, we’re a community and we do interact. If you’re going to try and do something like this, you have to expect that we’re going to realize you’re spamming. And many of us have very low tolerance for this kind of stuff.
A few years ago I worked with some senders who acquired most of their email addresses from technical conferences. They had a lot of delivery problems because a lot of their audience were the people who wrote and maintained filters. Spam the person who writes a spam filter and you may find yourself locked out from all of those filter users. I finally realized I couldn’t help those clients. No amount of technical perfection, personalization, looking like one-to-one mail or magic address cleaning is going to make this audience want your mail.
Marketing starts at understanding your audience. Permission is one of the better ways to understand your audience. Marketing to the anti-abuse crowd is a challenge. I can’t see any place where unsolicited email successfully fits into that plan.

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Google and Amazon and B2B spam

Many of the operational goals of a commercial spammer aren’t related to email delivery at all, rather they revolve around optimizing ROI and minimizing costs. That’s even more true when the spammer isn’t trying to sell their own product, rather they’re making money by sending spam for other companies.
Most legitimate network providers pay at least lip service to not allowing abusive behaviour such as spam from their networks, so a spammer has to make a few choices about what infrastructure to use to optimize their costs.
They can be open about who they are and what they do, and host with a reputable network provider, and build out mailservers much as any legitimate ESP would do. But eventually they’ll get blacklisted by one of the more reputable reputation providers – leading to little of their mail being delivered, and increasing the pressure on their provider to terminate them. They social engineer their provider’s abuse desk, and drag their feet, and make small changes, but eventually they’ll need to move to another provider. Both the delaying tactics and the finally moving are expensive.
Or they can host with a network provider who doesn’t care about abuse from their network, and do the same thing. But they’ll still get blacklisted and, unlike on a more reputable network, they’re much less likely to get any benefit of the doubt from any reputation providers.
Every time they get blacklisted they can move to a new network provider. That’s easy to do if your infrastructure is virtual machine based and moving providers just involves buying a new hosting account. But as anyone who’s heard the phrase “ramping-up” knows mail from new network space is treated with suspicion, and as they’re continually moving their mail won’t reach the inbox much.
Preemptively spreading the sources of your spam across many different IP addresses on different providers, and sending spam out at low enough levels from each address that you’re less likely to be noticed is another approach. This is snowshoe spam and spam filters are getting better at detecting it.
What to do? In order to get mail delivered to the inbox the spammer needs to be sending from somewhere with a good reputation, ideally intermingled with lots of legitimate email, so that the false-positive induced pain of blocking the mailstream would be worse than their spam. That’s one reason a lot of spammers send through legitimate ESPs. They’re still having to jump from provider to provider as they’re terminated, but now they’re relying on the delivery reputation of the shared IP pools at each new ESP they jump to. But that still takes work to move between ESPs. And ESP policy enforcement people talk to each other…
As a spammer you want your mail to be sent from somewhere with good reputation, somewhere you can use many different accounts, so your spam is spread across many of them,  flying below the radar. Ideally you wouldn’t have any documented connection to those accounts, so your activity won’t show up on any aggregated monitoring or reporting.
If nothing in the mail sent out identifies you there is nowhere for recipients to focus their ire. And if recipients can’t tell that the hundreds of pieces of spam in their inbox came from a single spammer, they’re much less likely to focus efforts on blocking that mail stream.
Over the past couple of years I’ve seen a new approach from dedicated B2B spammers, the sort who sell “buy and upload a list, blast out something advertising your company, track responses, send multiple mails over a series of weeks” services to salespeople. They’re the ones who tend to have glossy, legitimate websites, talking about “lead nurturing”, “automated drip campaigns” or “outreach automation”.
They have each of their customers sign up for gmail or google apps accounts, or use their existing google apps accounts, and then the spammer funnels the spam sent on behalf of that customer through that google account. There’s no obvious connection between the spammer and the google account so there’s no risk to the spammer. Google is fairly unresponsive to spam complaints, so as long as the volume sent by each customer isn’t spectacularly high it’s going to be well below Google automation’s threshold of notice.
Google do record where mail that’s injected into their infrastructure in this way comes from, in the Received headers. But the spammers run their sending infrastructure – list management, message composition, tracking and so on – on anonymous, throwaway virtual machines hosted on Amazon’s EC2 cloud, so there’s nothing in the email that leads back to the spammer.
And, for recipients, that’s a problem. Spam filters aren’t going to block this sort of mail, as they can’t easily tell it is this sort of mail. It’s coming from Google MTAs, just like a lot of legitimate mail does. In terms of sheer volume it’s dwarfed by botnet sourced mail or dubious B2B manufacturing spam out of Shenzhen. But, unlike most of that, it’s in your inbox, in front of your eyeballs and costing you time and focus. And that’s much more expensive than network infrastructure or mailbox storage space.
I’m not sure what, if anything, Google or Amazon can do about it at scale, but it’s something that’s going to need to be dealt with eventually.
Meanwhile, if you receive some marginally personalized mail from a sales rep, one attempting to look like 1:1 mail, look at the headers. If you see something like this …

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