The New Telemarketers
November 29, 2004
I have always hated talking on the phone. There is just something awkward about it to me, and I always seem to forget the things I needed to say. That is why I love email. I can ponder over a note for a few minutes, read it a few times, make sure it gets my point across. Because of this, the ratio of emails I send and receive far exceeds that of phone calls. Some stats to back that up: Since last February, when I first started using the new PowerBook, I have received some 2000 emails, excluding junk and auto-generated stuff like Word of the Day. In that same period I have sent around 1000 emails, proving I do in fact have twice as many ears as mouths. Now, on to my point...
How many phone calls do you think I made over that period? While I do not have empirical data to prove it, I know that it is far fewer, perhaps a quarter, of the number of emails above. I know I am not the only one who is experiencing this shift in personal communications, and it is not going unnoticed by mass marketers either.
I noticed this a few months back, after buying a domain (a web address, like bradleyboy.com). When you buy a domain, you are securing the rights for its' use over a certain amount of time. At the time of purchase, you are required to give contact information for your domain, also known as WHOIS information. You can do a WHOIS lookup at any time via this page at register.com.
This was never a problem for me prior to this fall, but now every time I buy a domain (I am buying about one a month these days, for CCSB projects or bradleyboy clients) I can be sure of being contacted over the next week by some bargain basement web design shop, wanting to know if they can help me get up and running with a web site. Uh, that is like calling a plumber to see if he needs his sink fixed.
At first it was phone calls. If you don't know how I feel about phone calls you need to re-read the article. While annoyed, it was not a big deal, remember I don't use the phone that much. But this morning I received an email from a web design firm, wanting to know if they could design me a real slick site for my new domain, thedevotionaltales.com. Well, they obviously missed this post when the site went live almost two weeks ago.
So why does this annoy me so much? I get loads of email, and spend about an hour each morning reading/responding to emails that I have received that morning or the night before. The subject and beginning content of this email made me think it was an inquiry into our work on the devotionaltales.com, not a solicitation. By the time I realized what it was, and fired of a ahem kind response to the guy, I had blown 15 minutes.
My question: Is anyone else experiencing this with domain names? If so, where are you buying them? Obviously someone is selling the info of recent buyers, and I would like to find out who so I can steer clear of them in the future.
Filed under Design, Rants, Technology
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