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Month: November 2005

Where Did Viral Marketing Start?

While doing some “ego surfing on Google”:http://www.google.com/search?q=%22ken+schafer%22 I stumbled upon something I wrote seven years ago and completely forgot about.
Back in September 1998 I wrote “Viral Marketing at its Best”:http://www.o-a.com/archive/1998/September/0118.html a post to the (at the time) incredibly influential “Online Advertising Mailing List”:http://www.o-a.com/archives.html run by “Cliff Kurtzman”:http://www.kurtzman.biz/.
This was the first time I wrote publicly about viral marketing although we at Sony Music had been working on viral things back in 96 and 97 even though I don’t think we used the word back then.
My post is a deconstruction of the then new idea of “Wish Lists” with an aside to explain “forward to a friend” links:

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Business Cards And Permission

Reading “Chip’s Deliverability Tips”:http://etdeliverability.typepad.com/chips_deliverability_tips/2005/11/business_card_i.html over the weekend got me thinking about spam, permission and privacy. It especially made me consider the tendency for people to believe that if they have someone’s business card it means they have “implied” permission to communicate with them.
From a privacy perspective and Canadian PIPEDA privacy laws we know that anything contained on a business card, or in a business directory, is information that is open for use by others as it is published information. But taking this information and adding it to an email list will always constitute spam.

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