LinkedIn addresses frequency issues

Yesterday LinkedIn announced they’re decreasing the amount of mail they’re sending to users.

For every 10 emails we used to send, we’ve removed 4 of them. Already, member’s complaints have been cut in half. And this is just the beginning. Less Email from LinkedIn

This is good news for a lot of people, as LinkedIn’s sending practices have always been aggressive. The send a lot of mail and not everyone likes that. They’ve been the butt of late night jokes, as they even acknowledged in their press release about decreasing emails. John Oliver of The Daily Show congratulated LinkedIn for “seem[ing] to have monetized irritating people!”
Twitter is rife with jokes about stopping mail from LinkedIn.

Unsubscribe from LinkedIn
Delete email account
Sell house, live in woods
Find bottle in river
Has note inside
It’s from LinkedIn
@darlyginn

Github has code to make it possible to “unsubscribe from all LinkedIn” emails.
The Daily Mash once opined the only way to leave LinkedIn is to destroy the LinkedIn headquarters.
The problem isn’t that LinkedIn sent so much mail. The problem is they sent so much unwanted email. I don’t know if this was causing them widespread delivery problems, although some indications are that the mail was bulk foldered for some Gmail recipients.
Listening to recipients is an important part of an effective email marketing program. Recipients tell you what they want, and what they don’t want. Sending too much email is ineffective and may result in delivery problems. I’m glad LinkedIn finally heard their users.
How much mail are you sending? And have you hit the downside of the curve?

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Happy Mailman Day!

For people who are on many discussion mailing lists, the first of every month is “Mailman Day”, and has been for nearly a decade.
Mailman is the most widely used mailing list manager for discussion lists and, by default, it sends email to all subscribers on the first of the month reminding them that they’re still subscribed to the list and how to unsubscribe. This is really useful, as I’m on some mailing lists that haven’t had any traffic other than the reminders in a couple of years, but it does mean that my mailbox looks like this this morning:

Discussion lists sending reminders is a close parallel to our usual recommendations for bulk mailing lists to send something at least monthly, so that recipients remember who you are and that they’re subscribed – and so that recipients who have vanished bounce that mail, so you can eventually remove them from your mailing list. (We’re not suggesting that you send a “this is a reminder” mail monthly – create some real content and send that).
Mailman Day also means that if you’re sending mail to a technical/internet-savvy demographic and you choose to send it first thing in the morning of the first of the month, you’re competing with a lot of noise in your recipient inbox. Unless you’re mailing daily it might be worth shifting a day forward or backward to avoid that conflict.

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Strangers, connections and social media

One of the major challenges of social media is letting people connect with folks they don’t know while preventing abuse. Most of the major social networks are trying.
Let’s look at LinkedIn and the tools they give users to stop abuse. Overall, they are pretty good about stopping their platform from being abused, but don’t have many processes to stop folks from harvesting connection addresses off LinkedIn and then adding those addresses to marketing lists. Does it happen frequently? No. But it does happen.
I have a pretty liberal “accept an invite” policy on LinkedIn. If people want to connect with me there and they have real profiles and they’re in a relevant space, I generally accept their invites. This means there are times when I connect with people I don’t know. I’m OK with this, LinkedIn is a great way to meet an interact with colleagues. It also means that sometimes people connect with me, take my information and add it to their marketing lists.
This morning I got an invite from Greg Williams. The name and profile looked like one I’d seen before, so I dug through my mail to see why this raised my hackles. I figured it out. Greg is president of some Tuscon area scholarship fund. A year or so ago he decided to ask all his LinkedIn connections to donate thousands of dollars to his non-profit. I decided this was not a connection I really needed on LinkedIn and removed him.
I don’t really have a connection with Mr. Williams. We didn’t go to the same schools, we don’t work in similar fields. LinkedIn tells me that we have two connections in common. I know nothing about him except that the last time I connected with him on LinkedIn he decided to take this as an invitation to spam me with money requests for his foundation. A foundation he didn’t really tell me anything other than “we give money for scholarships.”
Even more crazy is that Mr. Williams sent me an invite that says “I trust you and I’d like you to be part of my LinkedIn network.” I’m not sure who you are or who you think I am, but I don’t think you know me well enough to trust me.
I’m not against reconnecting with Mr. Williams again, but I want to be sure he understands that just because we connect on LinkedIn doesn’t mean I want to be added to his begging list. I looked for a way through LinkedIn to send Mr. Williams a response. But I can’t. My two choices are to ignore him or report spam. I think I’ll ignore him, for now.
One thing LinkedIn does to stop this problem is get feedback from users. When I click Ignore on the invite I get the opportunity to tell LinkedIn “I don’t know this person.” Hopefully, telling them I don’t know this person will stop future invites.
Social networks are a great thing and allow people to connect and create communities and interact with one another. Stopping users from abusing other members of the network is an important part of that community building framework.
 

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Color me unsurprised

Groupon and other Daily Deals programs struggling to find a sustainable business.

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