Are You A Spammer?

Rich Brooks of Flyte New Media has a dilemma:

I'm trying to balance the needs of my clients to ethically market their services  while protecting them from becoming spammers. Everyone hates spammers, so no one wants to look in the mirror and see one looking back at them.

It's a great post on how different entities (such as Constant Contact, Topica, AWeber, and Rich's own company) all define spam differently, and how his own thinking on spam has evolved.

Comments

[Rich Brooks]

Ed,

Thanks for your kind words!

I notice that you also just had a post about Blink. I just finished the audiobook (review here) myself and have been thinking about how I can apply it to Web design.

One section I liked in the book was how laypeople and experts agreed on which jam was best when they just tasted it. But, when the laypeople had to verbalize what they liked and didn't like they came to completely different opinions than the experts.

I've seen strong initial designs degrade with every change a client requests. Although I believe it's the client's site and they can have final say, I want to deliver a better product.

I wonder if there's a way to get them to give me an opinion w/o putting it into words somehow. Then we could make better jam!

BTW, added your blog to my newsreader. Keep up the good work.

Rich Brooks
flyte: what works online

[Ed]

Thanks, Rich--I've enjoyed your site as well and look forward to more good reading.

Insightful comment on Blink that's really one of Gladwell's key points: deliberative, reflective thinking can sometimes lead us in precisely the wrong direction.

I think the solution when it comes to web design is to move away from discussions of what people like or don't like, and toward usability testing that will indicate whether a design scheme or element is effective or not at helping users achieve their goals.

Lots of good fodder for my third (and probably final) post on Blink, which I hope to wrap up tomorrow. Thanks again!

[Scott Clark]

I also just finished Gladwell's book yesterday and haven't stopped thinking about how much it means for our business. I have always pushed tight analytics for my clients, for maintaining control of marketing expenses, understanding customers, and guiding future design.

But there is something about this book that makes me really think hard about the last of those. As I review, critique, design, re-design and essentially "live and breath" web design and web metrics, I have developed a sort of understanding of the "shape" of a successful web business.

My initial reaction to the traffic patterns and layout almost always predict the success of a given website once I know something about the market. Not because of some super human x-ray vision, but just because I have a gut feeling about them. I can usually list 50% of the needed changes within 10 minutes. But clients don't want to pay for that. They want to see me grind away, producing reams of information to support my conclusions.

But it's hard to stay good at it...Unlike the many examples in Blink, the web is changing rapidly; it's hard to really be sure if that voice-in-the-head knows what it's talking about!

[Ed]

Great point about clients' demands, Scott--which reinforces Gladwell's thesis that we're trained to distrust our instincts, even when they steer us right!

Interesting point about how a rapidly changing environment like the web affects the applicability of our instincts. But I don't think our instincts are inborn--they're developed through experience. As you say, it may just be harder to keep those online instincts honed.

If you're interested, here are my other posts on "Blink".