Food for thought….Mailing Lists and Social Media
Digital Week in Bristol are running a variety of seminars and events over this week. I went to Wednesday's event which was run by the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), hosted by the Chairman Andrew Morton, with a panel for the attendees to pose questions to, which strike discussions around the topic of Digital Marketing, which of course included Social Media. The panel included James Moffat from Organic Development, Sabra Swinson from Cerco Communications and Dr. John Lewis, an Innovation Specialist. Over my next few blogs I will be including an amalgamation of information that I have gathered from a few events over the last week, or so.
One of the things which I hope to gain further insight into was a topic raised near the end of the evening which surrounded Direct Marketing, company's mailing lists and social media lists. Can you see where this is going?
So, some of us within an organisation run a business social media channel - anything from Facebook, LinkedIn to Twitter (yes, there are dozens more!). Take all of these and you, as a company, have amounted a phenomenal database of people and companies that have 'opted' into being a friend, a follower or a connection. Through this you're able to communicate with them about your company, however this is all through Digital Technology. Take Twitter for example, you do not specifically have to be a 'connection' but people 'follow' your tweets because they are interested in your company. Now, does this give the organisation the right to use the followers details and add them to their company's mailing list (database)? Well, they have just opted in to communicating with you...!
It would be great to get some feedback about this, as it has conjured up an interesting discussion with us at Viper.
Tags: andrew morton (1), bristol (28), cerco communications (1), chartered institute of marketing (3), cim (3), digital marketing (22), digital week (1), direct mail (1), direct mail association (1), direct marketing (4), dm (1), dma (1), eoffice (1), facebook (28), innovation specialist (1), james moffat (1), john lewis (1), linkedin (11), mailing lists (1), marketing (63), organic development (1), provoking (1), sabra swinson (1), social media (33), twitter (24)
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Interesting question Jean. I’m not a lawyer but my guess is that those that know about the law in this area would draw distinctions between business-to-business email and business-to-consumer messages.
For myself, as a private individual, it’s one thing for me to follow on Twitter, or to “fan”, “friend” or “like” on Facebook, etc, but it’s another to have email sent to me on the basis of that connection. There might be a danger of spoiling any existing goodwill between us. (Business-to-business, I’d feel differently. It is, after all, just business.)
If I am asked if I want to sign-up for an email newsletter, or if I have some other kind of relationship (like being a customer), that would be OK. But maybe that’s just me !
I’d be interested to hear from the legal eagles out there that know the score on this.
Roger