CORPORATE SPAMMING

Our corporations and businesses love spamming. Despite spending millions of bucks on print and electronic ads, the repetition of which makes you wanna bang your head into the nearby wall, these companies do not let even the slightest opportunity go by without marketing even the scrappiest of their products and services.

And guess what, Pakistan is a heaven for these spammers! Firstly, there are no anti-spamming laws here to put a check on them. Secondly, majority of our people are illiterate and poor and couldn’t care less, so they never complain. Thirdly, most of the people don’t realise that half a dozen messages everyday in their mailboxes or cell phones are breach of personal space. Those that care and are fed up with everyday spamming are apparently too few for these spammers to pay any attention to their concerns.

There are numerous ways for spammers to indiscriminately send unsolicited content to people but I will only talk about the three media that are being used to spam every individual on daily basis.

Promotional Messages

Apparently the time of price wars in telecom industry is long gone and it seems that today the contest is all about sending more and more promotional messages to customers about cheap call rates, bulk SMS packages, lucky draws, subscription to various services, dead SIM activation and free balance. I have been a subscriber of all telecom companies from time to time and I can safely say that each prepaid customers receives 4 to 6 unwanted messages every day.

Every now and then I would be busy with my work and my phone would beep only for me to pause my work for spam! A few years ago I called my operator and asked them to remove my name from the spam list. The person at the other end said that there was no way of doing this. When the situation became unbearable I switched my network, but this didn’t help me one bit.

Now the number of promotional messages sent to prepaid users is far greater than those sent to postpaid ones, and there is one and only one reason for doing so. The profile of postpaid users is different in that they are high ARPU customers, mostly educated and working people. All the operators know that such people know about spamming and will object to excessive exposure to promotional messages. So instead, these companies target people that can’t do anything about spamming – people that are not educated enough to call back or walk to a customer center to protest, people that will not raise their voice to get spam laws in action and people that will not raise awareness!

Telecom companies know it is unethical and yet they do not care at all about this. The best thing would be to stop it right away. If somehow, they can not afford to do that, they can ask their customers whether they would like to receive promotional messages. If that too isn’t possible, these companies can at least make an exception for those customers that specifically want to opt out of this wealth of promotional knowledge.

I would like to remind these companies that corporate social responsibility is less about donating a few million bucks and more about ethical business practices. But then donations bring publicity while customer concern goes “unrewarded”, right?

Short URL: https://www.newspakistan.pk/?p=332

Posted by Awais Khan on Oct 17 2011. Filed under Opinion, Pakistan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry