One Person’s Networking Is Another’s Spam

Jason’s point about loose connections and reciprocity is well-made. And aren’t you supposed to keep in regular contact with the people in your network? Isn’t that just good networking?

If you write one person an email to tell them what’s going on in your life and in your business, that’s certainly not spam. If you copy/paste and send the same message to another person, certainly it’s still not spam, right? How many people do you have to send it to before it’s "spam", if each individual message isn’t spam? And does it matter if you do a mail merge instead of a copy/paste? That’s just simple operational efficiency -- you can’t fault anyone for that.

Now here’s Jason’s dilemma:

• On the one hand, he is trying to manage his list conscientiously by using Constant Contact. This allows people to easily opt out and not get accidentally added back in somehow in the future.
• On the other hand, because he is using Constant Contact, it is now very definitely a "mailing list", and not simply a number of "personal contacts."

Our suggestion to Jason and anyone else wanting to add their online social networking contacts to a newsletter is this: instead of auto-subscribing them to your newsletter, send those new connections an email something like this:

I’m glad to have added you to my LinkedIn network this month, and I look forward to continuing to grow our relationship and be of service by referring appropriate opportunities and people to each other.

I’m a firm believer that communication is the basis for building relationships. If I don’t know what’s going on in your life and business and you don’t know what’s going on in mine, it would be very difficult for us to be of service to each other as I would like.

As I’m sure you understand, it’s nearly impossible to keep up with several hundred or several thousand contacts on a regular basis if you do it all via one-to-one personalized e-mail. To reduce the time it takes me to keep in touch, I’ve set up a mailing list for people who are willing to keep up with what I’m doing, and I’d like to invite you to join it at http://(insert link here.)

I send it monthly, and it’s purely informational -- I will not be constantly trying to sell you something. I also want to keep up with what you’re doing, so if you have something similar, please let me know so that I too can be of better service to you by keeping up with you and your business.

That’s one approach. You may get fewer subscribers, but you’ll get fewer opt-outs too, and no one can fault you for this approach.

A second approach is to create a group within the social networking site and invite people to join it. As the owner, you can post whatever information you want to the group and people can leave if they don’t feel they are getting value from it.

Here’s our third approach:

1. Don’t make it a newsletter, don’t write it like a newsletter: Write it in the conversational style you would use if you were writing it to one and only one person, vs. the "announcement" style we tend to use when writing a "newsletter".
2. Be explicit that you're sending out a bulk mail: Some people feel it looks artificial to send out a 'personal' email that's really a bulk mail created with mail merge. So, somewhere in the document, we suggest use some text like, "I apologize for the bulk mail. I'd be very happy to catch up with you via phone/in person at your convenience." Or say, "Happy Holidays/New Year" at the appropriate time of year----it's common to send out a bulk holiday greeting, so that way you won't send out a message that may strike some as misleading.
3. Use the mail merge function of your contact manager and/or word processor: Depending on the number being sent, you may have to divide it into batches. You don’t want to send several hundred messages through your mail server all at once.
4. Only send it to people you would send a personal note to, and with "reasonable" frequency: Monthly is much too frequent for a personal update -- we suggest quarterly or annually. Neither of us do this on a regular basis, but we'll send out an email to many of the people we know when major events happen, like the publication of The Virtual Handshake.
5. Manually review the list each time you send out an update: Don’t send it to anyone you’ve talked to in-depth in the past couple of weeks who’s already heard what you’re saying in the letter. It's irritating to have someone you just talked to on the phone two days ago send you an obviously bulk message.
6. Personalize: If you set up your mail merge so that the messages don’t go out automatically, but get generated and sit in your outbox, you can go through and manually edit the few of them that would benefit from a little personalization.
7. Invite dialogue: As we did in the example above, be sure that at the end of your message, you invite them to e-mail you back or call you and let you know what’s going on in their life and their business.

Think people won’t respond to this approach? Think again. We have both done messages like this several times, and usually get a very high response rate from people. And not once has anyone asked either of us to take them off the "list". It’s an approach that's a bit more time-consuming approach, but also more effective.