Yesterday I received a non-personalized email solicitation asking if I would like to acquire email and contact info for users of WebEx products to use in my marketing. The note said that the list is newly built from opt-in, permission based data “compiled from various technology tradeshows, magazines, B2B portals, marketing research, etc.”
If I didn’t want the WebEx users list, I could also ask for lists of users associated with “Adobe Acrobat Connect, Citrix Online, Genesys Meeting Center, IBM Lotus Same time (sic), IBM Lotus Live, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, etc.”
I’m afraid they are out of luck getting me as a customer. The ONLY list I maintain is people who personally subscribe to my blog or my webinar news feed. And I don’t ever use those for marketing or other emails… They only get what they signed up for.
While I am not a big fan of rented lists (they rarely produce results justifying their cost), I find myself strangely encouraged by the fact that this list exists at all. When I started in the business, all our time was spent explaining what a webinar is and why it offers business benefits. Getting people to attend a webinar was usually done through the sheer novelty value of seeing/hearing a live presentation online. Now the technology is ubiquitous enough to deserve a category on demographic questionnaires so that marketers can target users of specific webinar products!
We’ve come a long way, baby.
