Experts don’t cold call

Some of the funniest emails I get are from “SEO experts”, and I’m sure you get many of the same. My initial thought is “if they’re so good at SEO, why do they need to resort to spam?”.

Of course, they’re not any good at it, which is why spam becomes their tactic.

In a classic post from Seth Godin nearly a decade ago, he defines spam this way, and explains the wider repercussions if we agree to allow it as an acceptable way to do business:

Spam is commercial, unsolicited, unanticipated, irrelevant messaging, sent in bulk. It’s the email you didn’t ask to get, the junk in the comments that’s selfish and trying to sell something, the robocall on your cell phone from a company pretending to be Google Maps.

Some spammers will tell you that all you need to do is opt out. But of course, the very problem with spam is that it requires action on the part of the recipient, action that can’t possibly scale (how many times a day should we have to opt out, communicating with businesses we never asked to hear from in the first place?) People are smart enough to see that once spam becomes professionally and socially acceptable, all open systems fall apart.

Related is a post I shared this summer, where “marketers” on LinkedIn were upset that people were treating them poorly after they spammed them.