Everyone is creating a web2.0 startup at the moment, fueled with all sorts of exciting ideas about AJAX, active white space, long tail business plans, new styles of collaborative marketing…

oh, and they’re sending people spam

I’ve received several pieces of spam from companies recently about what look like really good web2 products. The first time, I felt sympathetic, and told them that it was spam, and pointed out how this clashed with the type of marketing that they wanted to use. I’ve heard responses like “oh, it’s not spam because our product is really good and you’re going to love it”. WTF?

An email is spam if it:

• Is unsolicited
• Is sent in bulk

Furthermore, bulk emails, even if solicited, need to have an automated unsubscribe option.

That’s a pretty widespread definition. It’s also (in simple words) basically the definition used by the Australian anti-spam legislation. I can’t speak for other countries (New Zealand, where I am now, appears to have no such legislation).

The email I got this week, that prompted this post, was from stickytag.com. It’s a website for collaborative writing and moving around of sticky notes. Sounds web2.0 of course, and they even say “While we followed many of the design and development principles of the Web 2.0 buzz…”

And yet they sent me an email that is clearly not personally addressed to me, is sent to a range of undisclosed recipients, contains no unsubscribe information, contains a massive image file, and a great wad of marketing-speak, and presume that this will make me think well of them? Interestingly, it’s title contains the words “Blogger Release”.

This clue would tend to indicate that they think that by being a blogger, I have thus solicited their email, considering that it is on a tenuously related subject to which I write.

WTF? That’s like saying that by writing a poem about life after death I’m asking to be contacted by religious evangelists.

Anyway, I’ll stop ranting. The two lessons learned here are:

1. If you’re are going to play the web2.0 game, don’t fuck it up with something like this. Market the new way, by teaching, not by abusing your users. Go read Kathy Sierra and Seth Godin and Signal vs Noise and come back when you’ve figured it out.

2. Don’t use Sticky Tag (.com). We can’t afford to tolerate web businesses who behave as badly as Viagra salesmen, because it will eventually make all of us look bad. Boycott businesses which spam you. There will be another ten people with the same product withing a few months anyway.

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