[CLUE-Talk] Marketing to CLUE Members

[Jed S. Baer]

Taking Matt's advice (which was on my mind as well) ...

We all hate spam. We all know, or should, that the only appropriate way to
add people to a mailing list is via confirmed opt-in.

Beyond that, from a community standpoint, what other boundaries, if any,
should be held as "rules of thumb" (or netiquette) with respect to CLUE?
We all recognize the good intentions. The "I can be of help to people I
know via this group" is a good thing. It's the execution end of it which
causes problems, or ill will. All communities offer some degree of
"networking". Norms can either be explicit, or emerge over time. The ones
which emerge aren't always evident from casual participation.

I'm not advocating any of the following, I just offer these as discussion
points.

* Some communities, Usenet for example, have norms for appropriate
marketing type messages, by way of ".market" subgroups, e.g.
comp.database.oracle.marketplace. A similar approach is possible for
community mailing lists as well.

* Many organizations which publish newsletters and/or maintain websites
carry ads. Extra revenue for the organization can come from
advertisements. I recognize the possible difficulty given the fact that
CLUE isn't incorporated, but one thing that comes to my mind is ads in the
CLUE newsletter, in exchange for donations to the projector fund. These
could be pretty low-key, along the lines of existing sponsorship messages.

* Should one-off type annoucements to CLUE-Talk be considered OK, as long
as they're very short, and don't go beyond "I'm a CLUE member and a
businessperson, contact me if you're interested, or (instructions for
subscribing)." I note that this seems to me to be outside the boundaries
as currently described:
http://clue.denver.co.us/mailman/listinfo/clue-talk

For the record, let me state, unequivocally, that gathering e-mail address
by recording them from traffic on a list to which one is subscribed, and
adding them to a mailing list, is wrong. The absolute limit to any such
use would be one e-mail inviting the person to subscribe themselves, and
even that could be considered questionable.

To Rick: Your apology is accepted. Your course of action should be clear,
and it is to remove all addresses from that list, except for those who
have specifically (and verifiably) requested your newsletter.

jed
-- 
I wouldn't even think about bribing a rottweiler with a steak that
didn't weigh more than I do. -- Jason Earl