It’s such a good question, especially today. I was thinking of a few times that question could have been asked. Or maybe SHOULD have been asked:
Text marketing
Unless I’ve signed up for it, I find texts that market to me intrusive. Sure, I can delete them. And do. But it’s invasive. I do not market my products that way and I can’t foresee a time when I will. I cringe when my friends do it.
Messenger Marketing
While I’m talking about invasive and intrusive, it’s how I look at marketing messages I get in Facebook or Instagram Messaging. Years ago I took FB Messenger off my phone because it was so annoying. I do not need FB to tell me to “say hi” to my new FB friend. I want to get actual messages there.
Same with Instagram. I don’t want to be exhorted in a private message to buy followers, visit your site or watch a video. It’s invasive.
I delete these immediately. Because I find them so intrusive I don’t think I’d ever market that way, either. If I know you, I’ll buy from you anyway when I need your product. If I don’t know you I am not going to buy because you sent me an intrusive message on an app.
Robo calls
Don’t you love those fake calls where it sounds like there’s a live person having a real conversation with you, but if you answer “off-script” you realize it’s a recording? NO NO NO NO! Don’t do this! I would never, ever use a robo call. And I hang right up. I feel sorry for people who think they are really talking to someone.
But…then who ARE the people who actually engage and reinforce this terrible marketing method? Not me!
Expert-at-everything.
I would never criticize someone for trying to make a buck. OK, well, maybe I would. But there’s a strange phenomenon I see out there and it’s folks who market themselves as expert at–everything. Lots of things. Disconnected things.
Web designers who have absolutely no design skill. Life coaches who have no life experience and writing coaches who have no writing experience. Business coaches who have never been in business. Copywriters who have done it a few times and think they know how to teach it. Or do it for people. People who have self-published a terrible book that doesn’t sell and then become editors.
Need I go on? Jack/Jill of all trades, master of none, the saying goes. It is impossible to be an expert at everything and if you market yourself that way, savvy people scroll by. And just because you’ve done it once doesn’t mean you are an expert.
But apparently, there’s one born every minute (that’s “sucker” as in the famous PT Barnum quote that he may not have said but it’s still a good quote) and these poor suckers (I mean people) do not understand that they are not getting an expert at all.
That’s what I really object to: people being taken advantage of. Quiet time being interrupted by marketing messages exploding on the screen like a bullet. Lonely people talking to tape recorded people. Young entrepreneurs getting bad advice from non-experts.
What would YOU add to this list? Let me know in the Comments!
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Yes, I would like to add to the list! Email of course is a valid option. However, there is nobody from which I want to receive a daily email. It’s overkill and makes me unsubscribe because I can’t keep up in email. Weekly…maybe bi-weekly is acceptable. More than that and in time I will say goodbye.
I have no solutions to offer. All of these methods, I find intrusive and aggravating to the point where I make a note of them and refuse to have anything to do with them. Especially the repetitive ones.
Yeah. I’m no help!
It pisses me off to get a dm like these. I don’t answer them and I would never do that to my clients. Also, this new trend of having a little screen that shows you videos as you’re scrolling through. STUPID& ANNOYING!
What the eff is the “wave” think in FB messaging and why does it sometimes wave at somebody when I was just looking to see something we’d said in the past? I wish FB would lose that the way they lost “poke” (whatever that was)!
All so true, but the ones who really take the cake are the sales calls (mostly robo) at dinner time. I have taken the phone of the hook more times than I care to admit.
Robo Calls. Got to love them…she said sarcastically. The worst are the scammers. When I was living at my mother’s house she used to get them all of the time. One pretended to be from Microsoft and needed to update her computer software. My mother has never owned a computer. But towards the end, if she could have seen, she might have given out her credit card number to any number of scammers because she was beginning to believe them all.
Robocalls have been insane recently. I opt out of text marketing messages but recently I’ve been getting some weird ones from Nigeria and other parts of Africa. I joined What’s App to do a group detox and started getting all sorts of people trying to message me I had to block.
[…] and lays out some of today’s intrusive marketing efforts and other 21st century annoyances in “You Can…But Should You?”. On The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide, Rita R. Robison, consumer and personal finance […]
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Just because you can, should you? 
Yes, I would like to add to the list! Email of course is a valid option. However, there is nobody from which I want to receive a daily email. It’s overkill and makes me unsubscribe because I can’t keep up in email. Weekly…maybe bi-weekly is acceptable. More than that and in time I will say goodbye.
I have no solutions to offer. All of these methods, I find intrusive and aggravating to the point where I make a note of them and refuse to have anything to do with them. Especially the repetitive ones.
Yeah. I’m no help!
It pisses me off to get a dm like these. I don’t answer them and I would never do that to my clients. Also, this new trend of having a little screen that shows you videos as you’re scrolling through. STUPID& ANNOYING!
What the eff is the “wave” think in FB messaging and why does it sometimes wave at somebody when I was just looking to see something we’d said in the past? I wish FB would lose that the way they lost “poke” (whatever that was)!
All so true, but the ones who really take the cake are the sales calls (mostly robo) at dinner time. I have taken the phone of the hook more times than I care to admit.
Robo Calls. Got to love them…she said sarcastically. The worst are the scammers. When I was living at my mother’s house she used to get them all of the time. One pretended to be from Microsoft and needed to update her computer software. My mother has never owned a computer. But towards the end, if she could have seen, she might have given out her credit card number to any number of scammers because she was beginning to believe them all.
Robocalls have been insane recently. I opt out of text marketing messages but recently I’ve been getting some weird ones from Nigeria and other parts of Africa. I joined What’s App to do a group detox and started getting all sorts of people trying to message me I had to block.