Bigbasket.Com
Deceitful Spammer or Marketing Genius?
By Jessica Silliman
Rachel Bailey was quickly hired out of Santa Clara University during the dot-com boom to a company of 100 employees that ran an innovative social networking website in Silicon Valley. She was immediately put in charge of email communication to customers-both existing and potential.
The Internet was quite new to everyone and online communication (via email) had little corporate regulation or set social protocol. Privacy policies were yet to be established. With thousands of individuals discovering the Internet everyday, business was booming for the small Silicon Valley firm.
Rachel handled all online contact with existing users and was asked to market to these existing online community members via email. But she struggled with finding a balance of the right amount of marketing. With Internet competition growing everyday within the social networking websites, these users had plenty of alternatives. And flooding their email inboxes, she thought, wasn't the best way to attract them.
Unfortunately, Rachel's boss had a different approach. The Vice President of Marketing wanted results-he wanted existing customers to upgrade their networking packages and follow through on advertisements. He told Rachel to be as aggressive as possible with her email campaigns. But at the same time, Rachel spoke with coworkers who didn't want to work for a company known for its email spam. They prided themselves on working at an organization that respected its users and didn't abuse the ease of email communication-even within the competitive market.
Rachel found subtle alternatives to the mass emails. She developed links on the company website to advertisements, but she wasn' t getting the results her boss demanded.
One day when Rachel arrived at the office, her boss said he had a brilliant idea. He said that everybody knew someone named Cindy Anderson, so they could send emails to their users from that name to trick them into
By Jessica Silliman
Rachel Bailey was quickly hired out of Santa Clara University during the dot-com boom to a company of 100 employees that ran an innovative social networking website in Silicon Valley. She was immediately put in charge of email communication to customers-both existing and potential.
The Internet was quite new to everyone and online communication (via email) had little corporate regulation or set social protocol. Privacy policies were yet to be established. With thousands of individuals discovering the Internet everyday, business was booming for the small Silicon Valley firm.
Rachel handled all online contact with existing users and was asked to market to these existing online community members via email. But she struggled with finding a balance of the right amount of marketing. With Internet competition growing everyday within the social networking websites, these users had plenty of alternatives. And flooding their email inboxes, she thought, wasn't the best way to attract them.
Unfortunately, Rachel's boss had a different approach. The Vice President of Marketing wanted results-he wanted existing customers to upgrade their networking packages and follow through on advertisements. He told Rachel to be as aggressive as possible with her email campaigns. But at the same time, Rachel spoke with coworkers who didn't want to work for a company known for its email spam. They prided themselves on working at an organization that respected its users and didn't abuse the ease of email communication-even within the competitive market.
Rachel found subtle alternatives to the mass emails. She developed links on the company website to advertisements, but she wasn' t getting the results her boss demanded.
One day when Rachel arrived at the office, her boss said he had a brilliant idea. He said that everybody knew someone named Cindy Anderson, so they could send emails to their users from that name to trick them into