Friday, December 06, 2002

Spam-king drowning in snailmail spam. A spammer whose gleeful interview -- where he revelled in the money pouring in from spamming -- was Slashdotted is now drowning in catalogs and other junkmail. Slashdotters have submitted his name to every direct marketer on earch. "They've signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is," he told me. "These people are out of their minds. They're harassing me..." "Several tons of snail mail spam every day might just annoy him as much as his spam annoys me," wrote one of the anti-spammers. Link Discuss (via Plastic) [Boing Boing Blog] How funny, and oh so ironic. There is a term for this sort of thing: Navel-gazing.  Basically, being so focused on your own needs, desires, and pre-conceptions that you fail to see the needs of the other party.  As a result, your interactions with customers or associates fail, and you don't have a clue why, despite the fact that the reasons are right under your nose. A parable: There once was a company spent a lot of time and energy trying to sell business anaylsis services to their clients, in addition to web site design and development.  This was always a tough sell, because their customers felt they understood their own businesses well enough, and that paying for these services was a waist of time (and money). As business declined, a firm was hired to help this company focus their brand and product set.  When the CEO saw the proposal for work submitted by the firm, he immediatly struck out the analysis section, saying "we don't need that, we know our business."  The irony of this situation was completely lost on the CEO in question, much as it was on our Spam-king friend, above.   4:29:24 PM