List Explosion, Ethical Marketing?

This post on very viable personal trainer marketing might raise a few eyebrows and ruffle a few feathers.

Recently I learned of an amazing new strategy of adding 100s of new contacts to my list in minutes using Facebook and Yahoo. The prospect of this could potentially generate thousands of dollars of revenue instantly for anyone ready to run an email campaign for gaining clients or selling an information or internet product.

Naturally I was instantly thrilled and excited about this, afterall, having an edge, an opportunity to dramatically grow your business is always exciting. So I’m going to share it with you.

If you goto Yahoo.com and set up a new email address there is an option that will allow you to import your contacts, one of the ways you can do this is to import all of your friends from Facebook. Once that’s done there is an option to export all of your contacts to a spreadsheet, from there they could be added to your favourite email marketing software like Aweber, iContact or what I use; FitPro Newsletter.

Presto, you could add as much as 5000 new contacts in just minutes.

But wait a minute…

Is this ethical? How will these contacts respond? If they respond negatively will they still buy?

Truth is I started to listen to the reports of others that have done this, some were bad, some were really bad, some were not so bad, but very few were extremely positive.

None the less, any diligent marketer knows you’re going to face a few haters along the road to success, so what.

But…

The more I began to think about it the less I liked it, maybe it’s because I’ve been so immersed in Books like Delivering Happiness and Pour Your Heart Into It that talk about company culture, core values and beliefs that I just really didn’t feel comfortable with the idea exploiting what Facebook was originally intended to do…socially connect people.

Everything I’ve learned about effective marketing really comes down to a basic fundamental that I continually try to stand by, treat others I as I hope to be treated, and always try to over deliver.

Ultimately I just didn’t feel this strategy fit my core values for marketing, and it really got me thinking about all the crazy marketing things I have tried and the marketing that we presently offer and will offer in the future.

As things continue to move at lightspeed, and as service seems to fall lower and lower on the list of large corporate values I think this becomes an even bigger opportunity for the small entrepreneur. It’s easy to be distracted and dissuaded from your core values, it’s easy to walk on or cross over the line at times so I urge you to review, assess and re-evaluate often your own practices.

I’d love to hear your comments.