Mar’s Musings: When marketing tactics backfire
Technically, this post should be headed “Mar’s mutterings” because I’m not a happy bunny. Granted, I may be taking this way too seriously, but if there’s one thing I can’t stand in SL it’s merchants who add me to lists and groups without my knowledge, with the purpose of spamming me with IMs. If there’s another thing that I think is a dubious practise at best, it’s bribing people for Marketplace reviews with the promise of freebies. That said, onto the post.
I was slightly peeved to find myself being sent an Object IM yesterday by someone from whom I purchased a couple of cheap items on Marketplace a few weeks ago. Since I was offline, the message went to my email address, and – oddly – it ended up in my Spam filters there. On clicking it (normally I don’t click into spam, but this was clearly an in-world message) I saw the following message at the top from Gmail:
Why is this message in Spam? It’s similar to messages that were detected by our spam filters.
I clicked ‘find out more’ and lo and behold, one of the reasons that what would normally pass for any old Object IM from Second Life (we all get tons of them, from Midnight Mania messages to group notices etc) might end up in Spam was the following:
Behavior of other Gmail users, such as many people reporting spam from a particular sender.
This doesn’t surprise me, as – on teleporting to the location of the object when I logged in today, I was immediately sent another Object IM. Followed, one minute later, by another. These IMs came, first, from a welcome mat (although I didn’t touch it; I’m always flying when I teleport, and the mat was on the floor) and, secondly, from a Marketplace Magic Box that had been renamed to include the owner’s Marketplace URL. I was also sent two notecards: a welcome one, and one containing information about the subject of the Object IM.
Hop behind the cut to see why I get so bloody annoyed about this stuff.
Merchants, take note: these tactics make me NEVER want to buy from you again.