Sears is Getting LOTS of Attention

I'm seeing a huge uptick in traffic over the past 24+ hours and wanted to both recognize that (Thank You for the visits) and publish a blog post to gather anything people want to express regarding Sears' e-mail practices. If there's anything you would like to share, feel free to add your comments to this post.

FYI, the click-throughs are originating from retail-worker.com, and I offer a Tip-of-the-Hat to Tool God's gracious mention of EMailOrSPAM in his post.

On the topic of Sears, I'll only offer two points, that they're holding steady at a few e-mails a week, which seems reasonable, and there's no evidence that they've sold our e-mail address to anyone (at least not yet). But that's just what we've seen -- We're interested in what you have to say.

For those who may be new to EMailOrSPAM.com, our practice is to 'seed' websites with unique, use-once-only e-mail addresses and then simply report to the world what and how much e-mail arrives -- It's as simple as that, but it goes a long way toward doing justice to the very simple question many people ask themselves when registering with a website, 'I am about to give them my e-mail address . . Can I really trust them?' Well, visit EMailOrSPAM and see for yourself using our pre-seeded e-mail addresses and the data we've gathered along the way.

Our approach is to simply report the numbers and let you decide. Maybe a website's e-mail track record is perfectly fine. Or maybe they send way too much (or obviously share, sell, or are incapable of protecting their lists). Either way, we're just looking to provide you with the data needed to make an informed decision when trying to answer that question, "What will it be? E-Mail? Or SPAM?"

Let us know what you think.

Circuit City . . What Will the Future Bring ?

Ok, Folks. We only fairly recently added Circuit City, but they have our e-mail address. (For those who don't know yet, we use a unique, use-once-only e-mail address for each website we track. That way we can hold them responsible for everything that comes into that particular e-mail address.) Not that we wish bankruptcy on anyone but those that spam (and the ones that call my cell phone telling me to renew my car warranty even though I don't own a car), we now have a perfect control situation to study. At least in this one case we'll now be able to ask and answer the question, 'What does a company / website do with their e-mail list once they go belly up ?'

I've heard reports that, with their bankruptcy announced on Friday, that stores were slammed with customers on Saturday. There's also a clear statement on the Circuit City website along with early blogging on actual store visits on Saturday that operational responsibility has completely shifted to those overseeing receivership. Employees on the floor now seem to be taking orders from someone totally new. That paints a picture of what the average, everyday customers sees from the outside, but what's happening on the inside ? That's what we're curious to see (and track).

But, it's pretty plain and simple from here on out. Circuit City is out of business (so they have no business sending anyone any e-mail anymore). So, either e-mail will totally and permanently stop . . Or we'll start seeing a trickle, but from non-Circuit City activities, that maybe eventually becomes a torrent. It's really down to one or the other, but let's not prejudge -- Let's just wait and see what happens.

Tracking Page: CircuitCity.com

Thank You, Seth Godin !

I just wanted to highlight Seth Godin's post vis-à-vis the concept of on-line tipjars. Rather than make the argument myself, it seemed best to quote someone else's ideas on recognizing and 'rewarding' valuable on-line content. It's fantastic that incredible numbers of people are generating and contributing massive amounts of FREE content, but I think we'd all agree that it makes simple sense to at least put some amount of money toward rewarding and encouraging that behavior if we want to see more of it.

Seth's comments are succinct and convincingly disrupt the notion of why people should not be hesitant to click an ad in order to show appreciation.

You can read Seth's comments here.

Thanks, Seth ! BTW, loved Tribes. I've been including the theme in regular discussion asking, 'How / What can you lead ?' Many have understood and appreciated the challenge very quickly.

And, as always . . .

Tracking Page: SethGodin.com

What's Their Business Model ?

I can't figure it out. We've been tracking them for months, but it's still unclear exactly what ConsumerIncentiveRewards.com's business model really is. Can it really be true that there's real money to be made sending someone 100's of e-mails a week, month-in-month-out ?

We've been so staggered by both the immediate uptick upon registration and overall overwhelming volume of e-mail that it makes us wonder how they possibly think anyone could even use their e-mail (let alone pay attention to everything they send). There's offers at all times of the day and night, 100's of them a week. You honestly can't get any real work done -- All your time is spent deleting unwanted e-mail, not getting to anything important. It's silly to think any business would objectively think this a valid way to initiate and build a customer relationship.

All ConsumerIncentiveRewards.com is good for is annoying someone you don't like (think about it). We're also considering adding to each domain's tracking page a 'Lifetime E-Mail' figure so visitors can gain perspective on how much TOTAL e-mail / SPAM can be attributed to each domain. Thanks for the idea, ConsumerIncentiveRewards.com !

Tracking Page: ConsumerIncentiveRewards.com

At Least They're Consistent !

It's interesting and we don't know what the future will bring, but it's oddly intriguing that we get nearly the exact same number of e-mail from AmateurMatch.com each and every week (at the time of publication, just under 40 / week). With the exception of the occasional 'glitch' in our systems that may cause us to under report (never over report) data, you would think there would be more variance over time.

To their credit, e-mail volume to date has only originated from AmateurMatch.com, but the very clear pattern of e-mail volume would tend to favor either system-generated e-mail solicitations / notifications or an amazingly large system (where sheer size averages out what any one person might get). I'm not betting on the latter, but it is possible, if even remotely.

Tracking Page: AmateurMatch.com

We've Deployed a Search Workaround

I'm sorely disappointed in Google's search widget. Yes, it does return results. Yes, it's FREE, which is not to be understated. But it's simply not returning complete results for dynamically-generated .php pages that have been specified in the Sitemap for months. In some cases, pages that have long been indexed as part of Google Search have already adjusted to changes in our Search.php template page, which means pages that are indexed are being revisited and updated but that other pages specified in the Sitemap simply aren't 'making the cut' so-to-speak.

That's unacceptable.

So, we've deployed a workaround. Until Google's search widget either returns better and more complete results or we find something better, we're deploying a crude but effective alphabetical lookup of all domains that we're currently tracking. This will be updated regularly and can be found immediately below the search widget located in the upper right-hand side of the page. For an example, please visit the Amazon.com page and look for the "Lookup all domains alphabetically" in the upper right.

Dell, Moderate E-Mail Volume (but Complaints)

It's worthy of note that we're seeing e-mail arrive from Dell on the unique use-once-only e-mail address. It's from Dell. It's only from Dell, but we never asked for anything -- All we did was the minimal account creation process, and while some time transpired between that step and the arrival of our first e-mail, it does have a slight feel to it that we're somehow on the up slope . . maybe.

So, I looked around to see if anyone else might have Dell-related experiences, and I did find a few. They're not very complimentary -- Here's one from Spamhellfromdell's Weblog . . .

We'll keep an eye on Dell, but to be perfectly fair, they are only sending a couple of e-mail per week on average.

Tracking Page: Dell.com