I’m a web and database developer for the marketing department of a local utility company. My manager is a youngish, open-minded guy with vision, enthusiasm, and, in general, a knack for making the right choice and successfully defending that choice to the old-ish corporate Luddites in upper management.
In the past he’s given me a huge amount of leeway in developing and maintaining our online payment and account history app, to say nothing of a generous budget, and has been quite willing to listen to me when it comes to suggestions for new features and expansions of same.
Today, however, this productive and enjoyable atmosphere was sullied by our first serious disagreement.
It has previously been our policy to advertise our service via inserts in the monthly utility bills to our customers, and this policy has been both reasonably successful and (as far as we know) entirely inoffensive. Our sole experience with mass e-mail was limited to existing subscribers to our service, who provided their addresses to us with the understanding that we would not sell or share them (which we haven’t), was done solely for the purpose of announcing a slew of major new upgrades to our service, and was NOT sent to users who had chosen not to receive advertisements. I was a little leery of this idea, but I let it pass - after all, they’d explicitly provided us with their addresses.
Yesterday, bossman was contacted by one of the many companies - and I use that term only because ‘soulless, bandwidth-leeching, inbox-raping fuckchimps’ would take too long to type repeatedly - which compiles and sells lists of e-mail addresses for the express purpose of sending unsolicited ads. The idea here is that they will provide lists of e-mail addresses matched to the street addresses of customers in our service area, from which we’ll select those that are NOT currently signed up for our online-billing service, and we’ll then send them e-mail pitching our site. Wholly unsolicited e-mail, in other words; the bane of users, the mark of the marketing beast.
He says it’s one-time only; he says it’s cheaper and more effective than sending postcards to people who might not even HAVE a computer; he reiterates that we’re not charging for the online billing service, so it’s not as if we’re really selling anything. He then asks how it’s really any different from the leaflets we’ve been stuffing into the bill envelopes for years.
Dammit, it IS different! Bill inserts aren’t widely known for pissing people off! When was the last time you saw a news story about people complaining en masse about a bill insert!!! How many sites and organizations are dedicated to the idea of eliminating bill inserts??? Use a leaflet in a bill, and at WORST you get indifference – the leaflet gets tossed in the trash and ignored. Send somone e-mail they didn’t ask for advertising a service they’re not interested in, and the reaction can be (and often is) far more negative.
Boss, you’re a good guy. I know your heart is in the right place, I know this whole project is your baby, and I understand that now more than ever you need some really impressive ‘new subscriber’ figures to show the bean-counters. But I’ve put my heart and soul and time into this as well, and I don’t want our site to be associated with spam!
So I ask you, o wise denizens of the SDMB…is this just me? Am I over-reacting to this situation? I know a great many of you are sick of spam - as am I - and are likely to be biased against it, but that’s the point I’m trying (badly, it would seem) to make to my boss: the online community that tends to hate spam is the very community he’s trying to reach with it, and the net result might be an aversion to our service rather than an interest in it.
I need some good, solid arguments against this idea, because those I made above aren’t getting through to him. Are they, in fact, failing because I’m wrong? Am I being a knee-jerk reactionary and taking the anti-spam thing too far?