On thing that bugs me is marketers who cold call me or email me without having taken the time to look up my website or Google me to determine whether I would be remotely interested in their products and services. I realise that this is a bulk marketing thing and these callers are working off substantial databases they have bought and sold in the background without our consent but that just aggravates the problem. At the very least it means the databases are poorly segmented and targeted and that, to me, means they were thrown together and put out for whoever had some cash to blow on the databases. As a consumer it pisses me off.
I recently received a cold call regarding this conference:
4f44e463dcd47-Digital Revolution Media Conference
As a follow up to the call I received this email:
The email is a nice touch actually. It reflects more organisation that I come across in other direct marketing efforts but my issue with this particular approach is that nobody bothered to look me up and consider whether I am familiar with the “Digital Media Revolution” that companies are using to reach their customers or whether I have the faintest clue about “Why and How to build a social media business platform to maximise [my] company’s exposure on the Internet”. If someone at Joshua West had taken the time to visit my website they would have noticed that not only have I joined the “Digital Media Revolution” (did that about 6+ years ago) but I happen to be neck deep in the social Web and using it daily to do all sorts of things, including exposing my business on the Web. Granted my efforts are not perfect but this isn’t my first encounter with the Internet.
This conference may be amazing and there are some speakers who I know are pretty good but what irks me is that this is yet another effort to push dumb marketing at me rather than making the effort to develop better targeted and informed marketing campaigns. It isn’t just Joshua West, it the 1 or 2 calls I receive daily to sell me office automation products intended for medium-sized offices (I have even received a call from the same person in the space of half an hour with the same pitch), switchboards or some other product. My favourite (no, not really) is when the caller doesn’t ask for me by name but rather asks for “the person dealing with X”. That tells me the database doesn’t even have names, just a stack of numbers. Wow, talk about an approach designed to induce me to want to deal with your business. If you don’t even know my name and the industry I am active in, why should I give a crap about your pitch?
In future, my number for marketers and their dumb campaigns is 083 I DON’T GIVE A CRAP. Is that too many numbers?