Dizzy Gillespie famously said of his work in jazz music, “It’s taken me all my life to learn what notes not to play.” Such is the art of jazz improv, and such is the art in writing copy for marketing materials.
November 5, 2011 was a watershed moment in the financial industry. After years of consumers fleeing community banks and credit unions for Bank of America, Chase and other mega-banks, Bank Transfer Day marked the arrival of the “Bank Local” movement.
This is a story that reaches beyond the financial sector to encapsulate the demand for local, original and unique retail and service options across all industries. The space lends itself to those who invest in their communities and are not afraid to be vocal in creating and publicizing their niches.
Let’s do a quick run down: Kodak Imaging Network fined $32,000, YesMail fined $50,000, Jumpstart fined $900,000 and ValueClick fined $2.9 million.
What did these successful, upstanding companies do to get hit with these fines?
They sent spam.
We all get spam email. “Buy this, enlarge that, etc.” It’s to the point where it seems like spammers can do whatever they want. While there will always be rogue Nigerian princes out there, the United States does have laws mandating what is and what isn’t legal for email solicitation. This law is called the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. CAN-SPAM stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act.
How many predictions posts related to the communications world have you read in the past month? My guess would be at least 10. There have been all sorts of predictions, some interesting observations about the year ahead (such as small is big and social media crises will continue) and others just stating what we’ve already been talking about for awhile now (like content rules and measurement is in). For more smart observations about the year ahead, Shauna Nicholson makes you think with her expectations for 2012 in this post about marketing beliefs.
I saw this tweet from Amber Naslund, and shook my head yes. Seems like common sense, right? Unfortunately, common sense isn’t always common practice, and the Internet is littered with hundreds, probably thousands of examples of companies doing it wrong.
But this isn’t one of them. This is an example of a company making a mistake, owning up to it and actually emerging more human on the other side.
