One issue that is near and dear to me is postpartum depression (PPD). I suffered it with the birth of my first child. I now have a blog that focuses on the issue to provide support for women who have gone or are going through it. (By the way, I'm currently 16-weeks pregnant with child number two, and have discovered a fun new thing -- all-day morning sickness!)
This morning in my email inbox I received notification that I had gotten comments on three different blog posts from the same person. When I read the comments, they turned out to be written by someone promoting a screening service to help busy doctors identify patients with PPD. The person essentially wrote the same sales pitch for the three different posts and included a link to his business. That is indecent marketing as far as I'm concerned.
Where do people get the idea that there are no rules of etiquette when it comes to marketing? My blog exists to support women with PPD, and is NOT a free advertising service for all comers. I just think it's among the lowest of the low to comment spam to promote porn sites or online sales of Viagra or even more legitimate businesses. Fortunately I have a delete button. Everyday consumers can hang up on unsolicited sales calls, throw out irrelevant direct mail and delete spam as well. But it really peeves me that we even have to spend the time it takes to press "delete". I am completely against rude marketing behavior.
Thankfully, some marketers seem to know how to behave. I get emails every day from people pitching new marketing books, publicity events, new products, etc. Since I write about marketing, I accept that they feel I may be interested in what they have to offer. They write a brief, descriptive email to me in private, and I then reserve the right to decide whether I want to learn more. If I don't, I just delete the email, or sometimes respond back as to why it's just not something I want to write about. Most of these people then have the decency to respect that and do not continue to hound me. Comment spammers and others like them just skip over all the niceties and invade my blog. My blog space is mine, and my personal space is mine, and I do not like people who decide it's ok to raid that space for their personal gain.
Needless to say, I deleted all three comments from that guy so that they no longer appear on my blog, and if any more show up from him I'll delete those too. I've got my delete finger ready.
Tag: marketing
I agree with you Katherine - thank goodness for the delete key! I guess this person just proved your point about the need for Decent Marketing.
Posted by: Lucy MacDonald | October 13, 2005 at 08:00 AM
You can ban the offender's IP address to prevent further intrusions.
Hey, do you read Dooce? Heather's got PPD and she speaks out something fierce about it. Because of that and due to her huge traffic, she accepts no comments, nor trackbacks.
Posted by: David Burn | October 13, 2005 at 02:05 PM
That is the exactly the type of rudeness that gives decent marketers a bad rap. Congrats! on the new bebe!
Posted by: Toby | October 14, 2005 at 02:03 AM
Amen. I hate blogspammers more, I think, than regular spammers. E-mail spam is becoming more easy to filter and deal with, but blog spam requires you to log in and delete, hopefully without having their crappy messages online for more than a few hours.
Posted by: mark | October 21, 2005 at 02:51 PM