Spam from corporate communications?
March 6, 2008One of the speakers today at IntraTeam event in Copenhagen told us that a group of users in his company had complained to him about the spam they got on their company emails. He asked them what kind of spam it was so that he could try to adjust the filters, and they said it’s from Corporate Communications.
This is the second firsthand anecdote I have heard recently where intranet users have complained about “spam from corporate communications”. In the first case, a few months ago, it was an IT person who told me that the number of “deleted without being read emails” from corporate communications to employees was in the high 80-90%. A figure like this should make people stop and think about what their “all” email policies are.
It should also make us all think about how blogs with RSS feeds can ease this situation for users. People can then subscribe to what interests them. Of course, then the problem is that maybe people won’t subscribe to the feeds from corporate…!
That then raises a more fundamental issue of what type of news really does interest everyone in an organisation? In most cases, at least in large global companies, there is very little news that really speaks to “all employees”. Which of course brings us around to how to customise, and what is the right balance between mandatory and optional news items on a portal page.
What is common and who decides….two basic open questions for many companies.
These questions are subject to much debate – sometimes quite emotional, and touch on organisational politics, fundamental beliefs about the nature of human beings, and even philosophical views on the value of individual freedom versus what is good for the larger group.
March 13th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
I love so much this one
that I have written about it in B-rent
http://b-r-ent.com/news/communinaction-interne-ou-spam
March 15th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Spam from corporate communications?
Jane McConnell has posted an interesting observation on “spam from corporate communications”. To quote: This is the second firsthand anecdote I have heard recently where intranet users have complained about “spam from corporate communications”. In the …
September 21st, 2009 at 4:16 pm
“deleted without being read emails” does not alway mean that the email was not read. I have the “reading pane” always opened and I read those emails then delete them.
Alain
September 21st, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Thanks for your comment Alain. Very nice to hear from you and hope to be back to Montréal one day not too far in the future!
I agree with you, and do the same myself.
But, I do not believe this is typical behavior – I think it’s mainly from “sophisticated” or shall we say “jaded” (been there, done that) internet users?
One of my 2008 survey participants did this. I got notification he had “deleted without reading” my 2009 invitation. I dropped him a line to apologize for the unsolicited email invitation I had sent him, and he clarified that he had read it, did not consider it “unsolicited” and was joining the survey for a second year. By the way, he’s the intranet manager in one of the most advanced intranets in the world – so just goes to show – you can’t judge a person by the email they delete!