Spam. I’m not talking about the Viagra ones, but the more sinister ones. The ones you get from your friends.
To me, getting a message which is not adressed to me personally, and is not relevant to me is spam. The larger the adressed group, the more I categorize it as spam. I’m not sure which size is the breaking point, but perhaps somewhere around 10 people. It’s the point where you break away from where you can feel the sender’s sincere attention.
I experienced this personally from a senders point of view when I invited people to what I call “The Tuesday Breakfast”. It’s an event where we try to get together the smartest and most talented young communicators for a simple breakfast on a consistent and recurring basis. I saw that the most of the invited who where contacted personally showed up whereas most who only received the Facebook group invite didn’t. They probably missed it. It was not directed at them. It was spam.
In these terms, Facebook is spam hell. Or is it?
Well, in relative terms, no.
The world is spam hell. Advertising is spam hell. Howcome we think we can demand peoples attention when we’re not willing to give the same back? I know what you’re thinking here – we can’t afford to be personal with everybody – and I agree. But maybe, just maybe, we should put more effort into being personal with the influencers. The firestarters. Or in Seth Godin’s words “The Sneezers”. That way we can get the social dynamics going. Because social marketing (formerly known as Viral Marketing) is just that. It’s personal. Not spam. Personal.
Unfortunately you’ll might find it hard to get advertising agencies to do this because 1) How do you charge for it? and 2) How do you win prizes and get famous for it if it can’t be 100% tracked back to the agency? (A paradox is that especially young creatives, who should be on the barricades leading the revolution, are a lot of times the most conservative ones because they are so keen on winning prizes. It makes me sad).
And that’s where The Tuesday Breakfasts come in. These are the smartest communicators I know in the new generation. And we’re all on the same page. It’s our darned responsibility to invent, educate and agitate. That’s how you start a revolution.
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