Run Away and Hide! It’s SNAM!!!

Still reeling from SPAM attacks? The war appears to have escalated in spite of (or maybe because of) the CAN-SPAM legislation efforts. Every message now has to pass the SPAM filters, though it seems they catch more of the legitimate stuff and less of the ‘enlargers’, ‘success secrets’, and ‘prescriptions’ offers than I would like.
But now there’s something WORSE looming on the horizon – something that threatens to overwhelm the most dedicated networking-communication loyalists and potentially erode your free time, not to mention good Samaritan leanings:

SNAM. Meaning: Social Networking-generated email (requests)
Word origin: credited to Kenneth Norton, director of product management at Yahoo. I don’t know Kenneth, nor are we only “six degrees of separation” apart, that I’m aware of, but I applaud his awareness of a phenomenon.

Spawned by the likes of Tribe, Friendster, and LinkedIN.

If you haven’t heard of this, or tried it, check it out. The concept sounds great – enter your info, and all your address book info too, and find out if someone you know, knows someone, who knows someone else, who knows Governor Arnold and you can get an invite to the next big fundraiser dinner.

Per Scott Kirsner in his article “Networking Overload” (Fast Company, April 2004), LinkedIn gave the following stats for network contact request subjects:

• 50% involve job seeking
• 30% involve business partnership probes
• 20% appear to be looking for experts in a field
• Remainder are looking for former colleagues and friends.

Don’t confuse this with the LEGITIMATE business networking sites like Spoke and Zero Degrees. They do still send SNAM, but more politely, anonymously and not for fundraising or matchmaking purposes.  Sorry for picking on them, I’m a member of Spoke myself, having been invited to join by a client, and finding a number of other associates already using it. I actually found an old colleague I’d lost track of who put me in touch with several others and we are all now happily re-connected, communicating, having lunch and swapping stories about our travails since our company imploded in the dot.bomb era.

What’s the lesson and what’s the warning? Yes, it can be useful to be able to get that ‘warm’ introduction you’re looking for – as a salesman, a job seeker, a fundraiser. But remember that everyone’s time is valuable. Just because it’s on YOUR agenda to find all the senior-decision-maker-check-writers-hiring managers at Prestige Co.com, does NOT mean that the people you attempt to contact will have it on THEIR agenda.

Call me an old-fashioned geek, but politeness goes a long way.

Donna