I love spam

“There are people I know who won't hurt me. I call them corpses.” Randy K. Milholland

No, not that kind of Spam (more on that at the end)

I just received an email telling me I was the Grand Prize Winner and had won a new “Peugoet” car. Now, two things: first its spelled P-E-U-G-E-O-T and second even if it was true I would suppose 2nd prize would be two cars. Frankly, Peugeots have all the bad French qualities (small, slow, noisy and smoky) without any of their redeeming qualities (i.e., they don’t come with a lady from Bois de Boulogne Park carrying a case of Bordeaux).

Spam is today what snake oil salesmen were in 1800’s, part fact, part fiction, part entertainment, part annoyance, and totally for the naïve.

I feel bad for the naïve. Often times they are more desperate than dumb, more out of step than out of mind. And some of these offers just seem SO…DAMNED…GOOD. You want to believe. I want to believe. We all want to believe. But alas, the old adage “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is” usually wins out.

So, once you get over your outrage and annoyance of spam you can see it for what it is….pure entertainment. I mean, come on, you absolutely have to find great entertainment in the offers: ED remedies, free computers, discount drugs, discount girls, the list is endless. My absolute favorite is the letter asking you to act as a financial conduit for their foreign company. That for simply funneling these foreign funds into the U.S. for them you’ll receive a large sum of money. And all you have to do is email them your bank account information. Now really, what could be more harmless than that?

One of the biggest problems of spam, of course, is the occasional legitimate email of some importance that gets trapped in the myriad filters used to combat these pests. Deals get lost, opportunities get missed and relationships get postponed, much like lost mail but at cyber speed.

If you rely on email – as we all do – for your business communications you must fight the battle when a client or prospect doesn’t respond to an email as to whether they’re purposely not responding, have poor communication protocol or never received the message. If your email signature is getting trapped in a spam filter then sending more emails won’t solve the problem.

So, pick up the phone. If they’re purposely ignoring your email they’ll ignore your call THEN you’ll have something to fret about.

By the way, click here for the famous Monty Python skit about Spam. http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE