Zoominfo
Leads, leads, leads!
There are a number of places that will sell business leads from data they’ve compiled, crawled or crowd-sourced. How great is that? Anyone can buy a list of targeted business information to use to further their business goals! Awesome! Great! Step right up and get your lead here!
But how accurate is that information really?
One of the bigger companies, which allows for public searches, is Zoominfo. I did some lookups recently just to see what their data is like. My conclusion? If the data they have on me is any indication of the overall accuracy of their data, companies are way better off just setting light to a pile of money in their parking lot instead of giving it to Zoominfo.
Let’s look at the data they have on me. When you go to their homepage and enter my name in, you get about 2 dozen profiles. Looking through them, there are a number that describe me.
Laura Atkins; MCRS rep. Fair enough, I do mention MCRS on a few of my webpages and was recently on their board of directors. What I can’t figure out is why they think the Minnesota Companion Rabbit Society is run out the Chesterfield County Business Development office. The MCRS is neither a business nor is it located in the state of Virginia. It’s not even located in the same time zone as Virginia. Strike 1 for Zoominfo.
Laura T. Atkins; Founding Partner. This one is the reference that is most clearly me. Zoominfo claims this information was “community contributed.” OK, so someone uploaded their address book and my name and contact info was in it. But they have my company listed as simply “Word.” Sure, Zoominfo went and scraped a bunch of info off our website, but that isn’t reflected in the actual listing. Strike 2 for Zoominfo.
Laura Atkins; Spamtacular. This one is one of my favorites. I’m listed as associated with Spamtacular. Spamtacular is a blog run by my former co-worker Mickey Chandler. Mickey’s currently working for a major ESP, but he blogs about email, spam and delivery under the Spamtacular.com domain. And, in fact, the “association” is that he lists me as part of the Spamtacular blogroll. But Zoominfo claims they have an email address and phone number for me associated with Spamtacular. According to Mickey, Zoominfo have repeatedly attempted to mail laura at spamtacular. It’s not just my email address they’ve pulled out of nether orifices, though. The Spamtacular corporate information is, if anything, more inaccurate than the MCRS data. Spamtacular is not and has never been registered anywhere near the state of California. Strike 3 for Zoominfo.
But wait! Just because they’ve struck out doesn’t mean they’re going to stop swinging or walk off the field.
Laura Atkins; Context Magazine. I did an interview with Context Magazine back in 2002, and Zoominfo claims they have a phone number for me. I suspect this is not my phone number, but, rather, is the main number for Context Magazine.
There are a couple of other, less interesting profiles for me: Spamcon Foundation, Deliverability.com. All are demonstrably me, but with no real contact information it’s not going to help anyone get in touch with me.
I have to admit, I’m actually surprised at just how totally inaccurate the data about me is. I’m not that hard to find. Zoominfo has 6 listings I can clearly identify as me. In those 6 listings:
Buying lists and other stupid marketing tricks
Back in November, I commented on Zoominfo and that they were selling senders very bad lists. At that time, Zoominfo did not have my current information. They have since rectified that problem and are now selling my information to people.
This morning, I received an email that said:
Two reasons not to buy a list
Ken Magill, celebrity, has two articles today that highlight the issue with buying lists from vendors. The first is yet another article about EmailAppenders selling bad data. In this case, it is not the buyers who are complaining. According to Ken EmailAppenders are sending out email advertising they can sell Internet Retailer’s list of 2008 conference attendees. Internet Retailer is disputing this and has sent EmailAppenders a cease and desist. EmailAppenders is currently dodging Ken’s attempts to get their side of the story.
The second is an article about Zoominfo, a new group in the list selling business. Zoominfo has long been harvesting information from other sites. Now, they are offering to sell their scraped and harvested list. Their only requirement is that the buyer sign an agreement to comply with CAN SPAM. And, yes, if someone is dumb enough to buy this harvested list, they should comply with CAN SPAM as sending mail to a harvested list triggers additional penalties if or when the FTC decides to go after the sender.
Not only are Zoominfo harvesting data, they are harvesting from ancient and obscure sources. They have no current information for me, but they managed to find an email address for a job I left in 1993. They have Steve listed as an employee of “postgreSQL INC” because they harvested the postgres mailing list archives. Mickey pointed out one of Zoominfo’s sources is http://free-personal-ads-wanted-sex-partner-near-hays-kansas.themasterwithin.ca/arch/4/. You do not even need to visit that site, just look at the URL!
Zoominfo’s VP and general manager claims they send emails to people regularly, offering them the chance to opt-out. First of all, I have never received one of these, have any of you? Secondly, some of the addresses are so old opt-outs are not relevant. Finally, unless they are monitoring their delivery, which I strongly doubt given their business model, anyone buying addresses from them is going to buy lots of dead addresses. And spamtraps. Lots of spamtraps.
I am sure that people who buy and sell lists regularly will tell me that these are outliers and that most companies who sell lists have higher data collection standards. My experience suggests that these are middle of the road list brokers. They are companies who are willing to sell anything with an @ sign in it and do not care about how sending to that data affects their customers.