A few weeks ago, someone named Diana "friended" me on Facebook. I always give people the benefit of the doubt.
Soon enough, I was inundated by group invites and the like (no more Apps or Zombies or whatever). My patience was wearing thin.
She was interrupting me w/useless crap.
So, I shut her down. I "removed" her as a Facebook Friend. Too much noise. Not enough signal.
I did the same thing on Twitter with some folks I had thought might be interesting.
IMHO, there's a balance on stuff that shows your personality and stuff that adds value to my life (the reason I presumably started to follow you in the first place.) I skew to the 80% "value add" and 20% personal.
But there's also a quantity limit.
A few tweets per day is fine. More than about 5, for me, and well, that's more than I want. It's overload.
So I remove you.
In both cases, you are shut off from me. You don't have my attention and you no longer have my permission. So you can't get your story out.
Now, take that same experience and apply it to your business.
"We'll just call the customer again."
"We've touched them 4 times in this campaign."
I may not be able to "un-follow" or "remove" you....but I may as well have.
It's getting easier and easier to block ALL communications. And I'll tell you what, Diana can ask again to be my "friend," but odds are I'll say "thanks, but no thanks."
My time (and attention) are too valuable. So is yours. thanks for reading.
Comments
Adam Schorr said on 5.09.2008 at 8:38 AM
Well said! Now if only I could stop hearing the voices of bloggers ringing inside my head. Oh the madness!!!
Maybe that's the next move of the marketing industry. We give consumers free health care for life. In exchange, they allow us to place a chip inside their head so we can speak to them whenever we want.
David Berkowitz said on 2.18.2009 at 1:15 AM
Thanks for sharing this with me, Jeremy. I'm completely on board. There are people on Twitter I'd LOVE to follow - except they have 10,000+ tweets, and I know it'll be overload. And there are people I may not want to be as close to initially but if they don't post too often, there's less of a risk in following them so I'll give them a shot.
It's tough for me - sometimes there are days when I really want to say a lot but I have to remember the less is more approach you sum up so well here.