Do Not Disturb

Two things caught my eye this morning.  Claire Beale's column in the Independent is always worth reading.  She is the Editor of Campaign magazine but (despite that) writes well about the changing landscape.  This morning she offers some thoughts on the direct mail business: "Does the DM industry deserve its wasteful reputation? Well, the bald facts suggest that it does. Of all the unsolicited mail that drops on to our doormats, only about 10 per cent of it ever generates any response; so that's 90 per cent that gets discarded, often without even being opened. In an age when paper reduction and recycling is becoming a social imperative, that's a deeply disturbing – and industry-theatening – figure."  However, Read/Write's excellent analysis of Doc Searl's latest  project - VRM - warns that the coming clash between personalisation and privacy will create similarly unwanted intrusions into our lives.  "People just got fed up with intrusive marketing.  Traditional direct mail will seem merely annoying compared to the intrusiveness of pitches that will seem to know precisely who I am, what I did yesterday and so on."

Comments

[MySpace Bot]

If your social marketing plan includes social networking you cannot afford not be seen on MySpace. MySpace dominates the social networking category much like Google dominates the search engine category. Much like the fact that if you are not on Google’ s first page that you are not seen by searchers, if you do not have a presence on MySpace then you are invisible to the social networking community.

[James Cherkoff]

Thanks MSB, although MySpace is massive it's massive in a particular demographic. Google is massive in every demographic and that creates its dominance. But maybe you'd disagree?