On Sat, Jan 15, 2000 at 11:51:50PM +1300, Simon Blake wrote:
I'd be interested to know how many members of nznog saw the request to join NewZ-Flash(a)domainz.net.nz, thought "bah, gratuitous use of mid-word capitalisation, more marketing puff from Domainz", and chose not to join. I know I did, and I'm grateful to Joe for filtering the content of NewZ-Flash(a)domainz.net.nz and passing the interesting bits onto nznog. Had the list been named domainz-annouce(a)domainz.net.nz, or domainz-ops(a)domainz.net.nz, I'd almost certainly have joined the new mailing list.
Now I'm not saying that's rational, you shouldn't judge a book by it's colour, and all that, but that's the thought process I went through.
=) yep. Thats exactly the thought process that I went through. And I could not agree more that, in this case it might have been the wrong one. But when I'm receiving shyte-loads of these kind of messages per day asking me to join every mailing list from every web site that I choose to visit, you would think that a mailing list with content as important as NewZ-Flash(a)domainz.net.nz would have been architected to stand out to me a bit more. I'm sure that someone is going to reply to this and say ``You Dumbass, why didn't you just read the message and judge for yourself rather than just seeing the capital Z and deleting it.'' Well good point - but again, we have atleast two people here (Simon and Myself) , who can be considered in the target audience for this list, who just deleted this message right off the bat. Now if Saachi's made an ad for Telecom NZ which made 50% of it's target audience turn off the tv and walk out of the room instantly, how long do you think it would be before they got their ass's caned? No matter how informative the article is, no matter how important the information is that it carries, if you can't get people to read it then whats the point. To me it's like having a mailing list called `dO_NoT_ReAd_mE_ThEre_iS_NotHinG_ImpOrTaNt_tO_sEe_Here(a)DoMaInZ.nEt.nz' and putting ``Do you want to make money fast!!!'' as the subject. MAN! thats going straight in the bin no matter what it content is*. I suggest that NewZ-Flash(a)domainz.net.nz is only a few steps better. Atleast <whatever>-announce@<wherever>.com is a standard that your target audience is going to understand and do the right thing with, ie read it. Why do you think that Telecom has stuck with the fuzzy animals for so long? If it works then stick with it. They have obviously found that having fuzzy creatures bouncing on the screen while they read their latest toll call special rates is the way to make it stick in peoples minds. The golden rule of marketing ``If it makes people buy it, use it'' So Patrick. I would suggest in future you hire someone from your target audience and have them involved in the decision making process at domainz. If you have already done this, then by the very fact that people like Simon, Joe and myself are having this conversation with you, they are not doing their job. Dean * I actually considered changing the subject of this message to ``Do you want to make money fast!!!'' and then sending it out again, once with the orig subject and once with the new one. Then asking how many people even read the second one. But I think I've made my point and it would just waste peoples mental bandwidth. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Dean Pemberton - dp(a)lucent.com Linux User# 157870 Guy who does stuff at Lucent Technologies - Bell Labs Innovations Lvl 38, 55 Collins St, Melbourne 3000, Australia ----------------------------------------------------------------------- --------- To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog