Ahoy! Ahoy!
On a May evening in 1864, several British politicians were disturbed by a knock at the door and the delivery of a telegram – the most unusual occurrence at such a late hour. Had war broken out? Had the queen taken ill? They ripped into the envelopes and were surprised to find a message relating, not to some national calamity, but to dentistry. Messrs Gabriel, of 27 Harley Street, advised that their dental practice would be open from 10 am to 5 pm until October. Infuriated, some of the recipients of this unsolicited message wrote to the Times, “I have never had any dealings with Messrs Gabriel,” thundered one of them, “and beg to know by what right do they disturb me by telegram which is simply the medium of the advertisement?” The Times helpfully reprinted the offending telegram, providing the senders with further free publicity.
This was, notes Matthew Sweet, a historian, the first example of what is known today as “spam”.
I found this story from The Economist to be funny and interesting. We’ve been struggling with communication etiquette for over a century, with no foreseeable end in sight.
We are grappling with the politest way to use email to talk with our members.
There are many reasons to use email over paper mail as a means of communication and we are committed to making this shift. But, we don’t want to make the same mistake our hapless dentists made in the story above and irk people.
And so we tread lightly when it comes to emailing you with information. At this point, we have set a few guidelines that we hope keep our emails from being added to your ‘junk’ list.
1. We will not send emails more than once per month. 2. We will only send emails about offers that are time sensitive and beneficial to you. 3. We have made our ‘unsubscribe’ protocol as easy as we possibly can. 4. Our emails directly take the place of any paper we might send.
This is definitely a work in progress for us, so please give me any feedback about our promotional emails. I would love to hear your thoughts.
When the telephone appeared in the 1870s, people worried about receiving calls from people to whom they had not been properly introduced. And what should one say when picking up the receiver? Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, suggested “Ahoy, ahoy”. But as in many other respects, his ideas lost out to those of Thomas Edison, who preferred “Hello”, an expression that was rarely used before the telephone but is now ubiquitous.
QueenBee on October 14th, 2008 at 03:11 PM
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I apperciate special offers and other notifications from entities I deal with BUT not at the expense of trees.
shari storm on October 15th, 2008 at 09:09 AM
@QueenBee – I’m so glad to hear you say that. When we first put the team together to work on this, we had long discussions on whether or not a member who had a ‘no promo’ code (meaning they didn’t want paper marketing material) should also be coded ‘no email promo’. Ultimately, I won out and we didn’t assume that “no paper mail” = “no email messages”. I think what you said is true for a lot of folks.
Thanks for stopping by.