JONATHAN BURSTON

ePrivacy - let's name and shame

I wrote recently about opting out and companies not taking any notice of my wishes.

Well, now I'm taking it to the next stage. Over the last month I've been monitoring how effective organizations are in taking into account my ePrivacy wishes. And I'll monitor again for a further month just to give companies a chance to get it right.

I'll publish the results here but if you'd like a copy of the report, email me and I'll send it to you.

Big Ben World

Yes that's right a major new attraction is on the scene, one I'm sure that many parents have not heard of, including me. 

My two and half year old N, said that this weekend, she'd like to go to 'Big Ben World'. Big Ben World! Where on earth is that?

L, my five year old corrected her, 'It's Mercedes-Benz World!' I have to be honest I prefer 'Big Ben World' and that's what it's now called.

I've never been so popular...

...well, with recruitment agents. It's not surprisingly managing a group of sales people to get calls from recruitment agencies seeking to work with me and my company helping me find my next best team member. However, what is so noticeable is the sheer volume of calls I am getting on a daily basis. I never knew there were so many recruitment companies out there, who as they say are different from the rest and in my experience rarely are. 

Is it possible to use the Recruitment Call Barometer (RCB) as a gauge for whether we're heading or already in a recession? If we can, it's a real worry. 

Please let me opt out!

How hard can it be to opt out of receiving emails from organisations that you're no longer interested in or as predominantly in my case where the email you receive from such companies lacks relevance!!

Sometimes I wonder whether email marketing hasn't just gone back in time, to a time when direct marketing was all about throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping some of it stuck!

I receive quite a lot of newsletters, marketing emails etc. I realise I've been clogging up my inbox with such items and thought why not just opt out of receiving them, so that I can focus upon the ones that I want to receive.

Sounds easy doesn't it. Well no! You opt out, get the prompt saying you've opted out and well you've guessed it, you still get emails from them. Then on occasions when you try and opt out you have to log into your account to change your email preferences with a password that you've only used once and more than likely forgotten. I had to go through this process for one airline I opted out of last week. Imagine my surprise when today I get another email from them!! 

Come on guys make it easy to opt out! I know we're heading for torrid economic times and email marketing is a cheap alternative to other marketing channels, but don't you realise that you're damaging your brand and ultimately leading to stricter regulation.

A child's mind...amazing (again)

My elder L and I were looking through her children's atlas tonight at her bedtime. We were randomly choosing pages and reading the entries and looking at the maps. I was explaining what I knew of certain countries and where I had travelled.

We came to the page with Russia on it and I explained that there was a man called Stalin who ruled the country many years ago. He wasn't a nice man and would send people away to camps, not quite Centreparcs or Sandy Balls (google it, it does exist and it's good - I've been there), for doing naughty things in his eyes and they lived on the edge of the artic circle in very cold weather with little food and poor clothing in places called Gulags.

My daughter then asked me, 'Did they see Father Christmas?', I said 'I thought so' and she replied, 'I wouldn't like to see him.' It was time to move onto another page.....