One is The Milk Pail Market in Mountain View. They have a reasonably active Facebook page. How have they been using social marketing?

• Announcing specials “from now ’till close, come in and tell your cashier “Milk Pail Rocks” and get a free pint of ice cream.
• Posting about special events and tastings.
• Posting their weekly sales pages.
• Promoting other local food related businesses.

Another is Gordon Biersch Palo Alto. They have a Facebook page and a twitter account. They regularly tweet about which bartender is working. As they are a brew pub and all their beers are made on-site, they also tweet the status of their current seasonal. It’s a good way for fans to keep up with the beer status.

The thing about both of these companies is they feel authentic. They really are ways for the companies to keep in touch with their regular customers. It’s not always about driving new customers in, but more about keeping the current customers happy.

This also recently happened when a well known email marketer took all 500+ of his Linked In contacts (including me) and added them to his corporate Christmas card list. His behaviour also created a bit of a stir, although it was a little less public.

That mailing was interesting, because a number of people who received the card thought this was the Best Use of Email, EVER! Some of them went so far as to opine “How could ANYONE not like this mail? What are they, Scrooge?” Well, actually, I found the mail irrelevant and a bit annoying. I have to admit I would have been a lot less annoyed if I knew this was a one time thing. However, in order to comply with CAN SPAM he included an opt-out. Which lead to some head scratching: have I been added to their full list? Am I going to get their newsletter from now on? Do I have to opt-out? What was he thinking?

Watching both of the above situations go down I have come up with a list of things you must consider when sending bulk mail to people who have connected with you on social networks.

1. Not everyone will necessarily be happy to receive this mail from you. Consider how closely you are connected with the person. Ask yourself: Would this person appreciate a commercial email from me or my company? If you don’t know the person well enough, then it’s likely that the answer will be no. Put a little time and energy into making sure that your message is going to be wanted. If that means dropping people you’re not sure about off your contact list, then do it.
2. Consider sending out personal mails, not importing the email addresses into your CRM system or sending them out through your ESP. Don’t make the message look like a mass mailing. This is a social network, make your contact actually social.
3. Think about what YOU are bringing to the relationship with the recipient. Are you actually offering them any value? With the Christmas card I received the  message was “Our company is wonderful! We love ourselves. And we think we’re so great we’re going to send out this card telling you how we’re not sending out Christmas cards this year!” In Al’s case the message was adding him to a mailing list. In both cases, neither of us cared. There was nothing in it for us.
4. If you want to announce a product and or service use the tools provided by the social networking service. LinkedIn has InMail, which allows recipients to set their contact preferences and mail through their system.
5. If recipients object to your email, arguing with them is never helpful. You’re not going to convince them the mail is wanted, you’re just going to convince them that you’re an unrepentant spammer. Apologize, learn from it, move on.

Social networks can be great for marketing, but simply harvesting addresses and assuming that all your contacts want to hear about you is a poor idea. Putting a little time and effort into contacting them individually rather than as a group will head off these potential problems.

Update: Al published his own thoughts and suggestions

It’s happened twice in the last week.

In most recent example, I was asking my twitter network for some advice on pasta making. I’ve made pasta a few times, but it’s never been exactly right. Not having an Italian grandmother to ask, I was looking for someone with experience in pasta making to answer a few questions. I was having an ongoing conversation with a friend who was helping me troubleshoot my problems. He gave me his recipe to try to see if that would work better.  I thanked him profusely and replied that I would give it a try but probably not tomorrow because it was accounting day and those tend to run late. Someone replied to that tweet suggesting I try some random accounting software to make my accounting easier.

Just… No.

Interjecting product ads in a conversation may be the “acceptable” and “best practice” way to market through social networking. But, I can promise that you’re no better the guy who interrupts conversations at parties so he can hand out business cards for his affiliate program selling herbal male enhancement drugs.

Don’t be That Guy.

Update: Today’s twitter spam was from one of the email accreditation services attempting to sell me their email delivery services.