A Special Place for Spammers

I’ve been waiting for a good case study to illustrate what I’ve been saying about spam filtering over the last several months.

Last week a global provider of bulk email services had to deal with one of its rogue customers who’d gained a reputation as a spammer. While it did, a large-but-untold number of innocent and spam-compliant emailers couldn’t get their messages into customers’ inboxes.

Aha! The rubber hits the highway. Here’s how it went down:

Spamhaus Project, the international cyber crime fighting organization, placed the rogue emailer’s internet (IP) address on its blacklist of spammers. The rogue’s IP address belonged to the rogue’s email provider, which meant the millions of innocent commercial emailers also using that provider were painted with the same “spammer” brush. The Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who subscribe to Spamhaus’ blacklist wouldn’t deliver anyone’s email from that service until the matter was resolved.

Damage control overdrive with Hotmail, Yahoo! and others

The commercial email service provider had to go into damage control overdrive, suspending the rogue’s account, communicating with innocent emailer senders about the delay to their campaigns, and proving to Spamhaus that they’d taken the right precautionary and reactionary measures required. Until Spamhaus removed the address from its blacklist, ISPs like Hotmail, Yahoo! and others wouldn’t deliver any of the provider’s clients’ email.

Ouch!

This is tough to convey in words, and I acknowledge using some jargon here, so I suggest you visit Spamhaus for flowcharts that illustrate how filtering works.

Follow commercial email rules

The upshot for commercial emailers: if your email service provider advises you to use a double-opt-in subscription process or to certify that you haven’t purchased an email list, or subscribed people without their permission, comply quickly and don’t complain about the extra steps. These procedures are necessary to convince Spamhaus and the ISPs that you’re a compliant emailer, even if someone else using your service isn’t.

This also points out the reason to use a bulk email service instead of sending email campaigns from your own email account. That way, if you are accused of spamming, you’ll have a knowledgeable and experienced company go to bat for you with the international cyber services. If I may be so bold to ask, please consider using my email service.

The Spamhaus Project is a great study for international cooperation. Be sure to hit the tags to the right for more of what I’ve written on SPAM and e-newsletters.

Straight Talk on Compensation

Interesting piece in Sunday’s NYT on financial planners based on the news that James Putman and another employee of Wealth Management took $1.24 million each in kickbacks related to certain investments they were making for clients and fraudulently allocated $102 million in client funds.

The Times’ reporter said to “Check the legitimacy of planners’ credentials, and ask them to sign a fiduciary oath, promising to act in your best interests at all times. And read every word of every account statement. If you see something, say something. You should never be confused by jargon, strange numbers or anything else on your statements.”

Who can disagree with that advice?  A lot of planners, brokers and advisers, from the sounds of things.  As I’ve written before, my first career was financial services.  I know earnest professionals and I know snakes in the grass.  If ever there was a time for proactive client communications, this is it.

Financial & Consulting Writing Prompts

Financial advisers aren’t the only professionals with compensation conflicts.  What about the IT firm that also sells the license to the software they’re installing…these prompts work for a variety of circumstances.

• If you own your firm, tell your clients why you decided to structure your compensation as you did.   If you work for a broker or agency, tell your clients why you believe the comp structure you work under is fair to you and to them.
• Explain how you balance the competing interests of your financial future and theirs.
• Have an up-front discussion about how they can challenge your ethics.
• Do you belong to a professional organization that requires credentialing?  Tell your clients about the credentialing process and how your preparation and credentialing benefit them.
• Publish your continuing education plans for the year.
• Solicit feedback from clients: what topics do they find most confusing?

Compassion Fatigue

As a ghostwriter with financial services clients, I stay abreast of developments in their professional publications. Ran across an article in Investment News on consumer-focused financial planners’ mental health challenges during this Great Recession.

The article says mental health professionals coined the phrase “compassion fatigue” to describe a syndrome experienced by caregivers of  individuals facing a terminal illness. “Instead of empathizing or ‘feeling bad’ for someone, the caregiver essentially tunes out the patient in an effort to prevent himself or herself from being drawn into a pit of despair.”

The article goes on to say that “many advisers are experiencing a phenomenon known as ‘shared trauma,’ which develops when an adviser has been as victimized by the financial crisis as much as his or her clients” and says this causes some advisers to avoid client contact.”

Jeffrey Goldbert complained about that in an Atlantic Monthly article I blogged about — said he fired his broker because his broker had de facto fired him by not communicating. Perhaps his broker was suffering compassion fatigue or shared trauma, but the article gave me the impression that his broker had simply gone under a tidal wave of corporate compliance.

The Investment News article quoted Patricia Smith, the founder of the Compassion Fatigue Awareness Project in Mountain View, CA as saying advisers “need to start with the fact that [the bear market] isn’t their fault.”

Hmmm, I have mixed feelings on that point.  No, it wasn’t entirely the fault of financial advisers, but  most of them signed on to work in an environment where they’re expected to toe the company line, including pushing instruments at the direction of their firms.  If I called my Merrill Lynch broker to ask about X fund, he would be obliged to tell me what his research department’s position is on it.  Maybe his entire knowledge of fund X is limited to the firm’s position.  Firms go to great lengths to assure compliant client communications.

Because it’s difficult to set up shop as an adviser without the broker dealer infrastructure, is the best conclusion that system really is rigged?

Writing Prompts:  Financial Services

• With so many people trying to cast a wide net for blame, how much should be shouldered personally by advisers?  Are advisers equal victims?  Well-compensated pawns in the larger game?
• Should advisers pull on their big girl panties and consider this stress an occupational hazard for which they were pre-compensated during the boom?
• Do these findings give the investing public room to empathize with their advisers?
• What reforms do you anticipate between firms and their representatives?
• Will the ill will between client and adviser push investors to instruments like index funds?

Field Organizations Run Amok

Jordan Ayan at Media Post offered good advice on how to work WITH field organizations on e-Newsletters.

Mr Ayan defined “field organizations” as divisions, salesmen, distributors, franchisees, etc., and noted that many of them send email campaigns with little control or input from the parent organization.

I’ve been on both sides of this equation. Working for the parent organization that owns the brand, I know everyone in the field thinks they’re a marketing genius and corporate/home office is just there to get in the way.  Working for the field organization I know how long it can take corporate know-it-alls to get out of their never-ending meetings and get something done (for a change)!

Here’s what Mr Ayan suggested would encourage field organizations’ marketing initiatives while mitigating the “collateral damage” (including CAN-SPAM violations) they can cause:

1.  Let field organizations know your objective is not to shut them down, but to understand what is working, to facilitate implementation of best email practices across the organization, and perhaps even to provide some tools to make doing the job easier.

2.  Audit their list practices. In some cases, the lists field organizations have built are far superior to anything a corporate entity can do because of their proximity to the customer. In other cases, it could be a CAN-SPAM nightmare waiting to happen. This is especially true if they are operating without an effective opt-out process, or worse yet, with no opt-out process at all.

3.  Determine if you can facilitate the email process. The key word here is facilitate, not control. If a field organization feels that you are trying to control them, they will start trying to figure out all the ways to work around you. However, if you make it easier for them to do something that they have already found is effective, you may find that you have a large fan base.

How about it, readers?  No matter which side of the fence you’re on, what works well and what’s a bust?  Do tell.