In your online and offline life you will have positive and negative relationships.  My suggestion, if you can’t have a positive relationship online don’t have one at all.  Whenever I start an online relationship I select the DO NOT SEND ME PROMO EMAILS option (if available).  In this way I help my vendor understand what sort of relationship I want to have (don’t call me, I’ll call you).  However this morning, I got an email that appeared to be from Craig Strong at Lensbaby (he makes very cool selective focus lenses).  From the subject it appeared to me that he might want me to show off some of the pictures I have taken with my Lensbaby, but as soon as I opened the email I realized it was a ‘form email’.  Lots of pictures, links and an utter lack of a personal message were my first clue.

Had the email been from Craig to me and been more personal I would have been very interested in participating.  How hard would it have been for Craig to write a simple email and send it to people who have purchased his lenses?  How many emails can one person handle?  Perhaps he should have sent out 100 and waited for the response.  What is the response rate for personal email?  I suspect it is fairly good, perhaps 20%.  Assuming 20 people emailed him and half of those who responded were interested in participating he could easily call them.  In less than a day Craig might have engaged 10 fans willing to help promote his product and in the process become even more connected to him and his brand.  What if Craig did this sort of relationship building once a week for a year?  It is possible that he would have formed a positive and direct relationship with as many as 500 of his customers.  Oh and Craig doesn’t have to be the only person at Lensbaby building relationships, he could enlist other people to start a direct conversation with customers as well.

But I know, it is much easier to email 10,000 people than it is to call 100 people.  But what have you gained?  Have you built a positive relationship?  Maybe, but I suspect for every positive relationship you form from SPAM, you lose the possibility for forming a relationship with 100 people FOREVER.  Just my two cents…

Alexander & I have been working a lot lately on all the Big in Japan tools. Lots of changes to PodServe, revamping FrankenFeed in Rails and with the new user experience tweaks we’ve been doing to all the tools, and launching the remaining tools. (Note to self: doing ten apps at once is not a good idea.) We posted up SocialMail for a bit of feedback, and we’re getting it.

What’s SocialMail? It’s a tool that lets you get any email as an RSS feed. Now, for non-geeks, that means you don’t have to keep piling on your Inbox just to stay connected with people. For me, and perhaps for many of you, email is just not as effective anymore. If I’m out for half a day, my email piles up so much that I’m not as effective in paying attention to things. I’m managing most of my projects through various Basecamps, and getting feed updates on new actions and such.

You can use SocialMail to:

• Forward any email to an RSS feed, tracking it in your newsreader or republishing to a blog. For instance, it might be handy to have all support@ emails republished to an internal blog where your team has better access to them.
• Create non-managed email discussion lists. Want to have a quick talk about Bay Area Hiking? Create BayHikes@biggu.com and let everyone interested subscribe to that feed. They don’t have to give you an email address, nor do they have to unsub and manage their participation when they tire of the conversation. They simply unsub from the feed. Then, again, you can republish the information to a blog, etc., making it more searchable, indexable, easier to interact with than typical email.
• Share common addresses. Instead of having one person responsible for sales@ or support@, create a SocialMail feed and let everyone in the company have access to these public emails.

I’m sure our users will come up with many more things, but we’ve started the ball rolling. Read Alexander’s write-up or check out what TechMeme is tracking on this new tool.