Last week, I wrote about Plaxo. You know, the impersonal emails you get from people asking you to update your contact info. I really don’t think much of the service at all. I consider it to be equal to spam.
But what I think about Plaxo the company just went up a significant number of notches.
Plaxo’s CEO Ben Golub posted a public apology on Friday on the Plaxo blog:
[...] To everyone who hated getting Plaxo update messages, felt we were generating acquaintance spam, or otherwise were harmed by the service, I personally apologize on behalf of all of the people at Plaxo. I know we have a long way to go to earn your trust, and can only ask that you judge us by our actions going forward.
Mr Golub, while I won’t be using your service (note I haven’t included ‘ever’ in that phrase), I admire your honesty and openness. Thank you.
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I’d agree with Neville: this is certainly a good first step by Mr. Golub, and he should be commended for that. The key now is to reduce the volume of impersonal e-mails it is blasting out.
And this may be nitpicking, but why does Mr. Golub’s signature at the end of the post includes this parenthetical comment and link: “(Contact info available at techcrunch)”? Why not include some relevant contact details right within the post, where he has the reader’s attention, rather than sending the reader to another site to hunt them down?
Bryan, that link is to a TechCrunch post about a company called Jigsaw (very bad spam guys indeed is a feeling you get from that post) which includes an image of Ben Golub’s business card. So a little joke there, I think.
Neville, this is my first visit to your excellent blog. I also ignore Paxo reguests for contact updates. Mr Golub hasn’t actually said he is going to stop sending them, just apologised for offending your sensitivities.
Delivering the New PR – London Calling…..
The third in the series of University of Sunderland’s “Delivering the New PR” events takes place in the London Marriot in Regents Park on May 12, 2006. The event follows on from successful outings in Sunderland and Manchester. The speaker……
Neville, after registering for a European Commission conference in Brussels the other day, I received an official email asking me to give them my contact details via Plaxo! Is that the sort of professionalism you expect from the EU? (it probably is)
Thanks for visiting, Ellee. So you ignore Plaxo requests too. I actually know more people who do that than use it themselves. Still, the compoany has recently reported some impressive growth.
BenB, someone in the EC clearly believes in Plaxo! I wonder how such a request affected the show rate for the conference.