Is email spam a tool in growing your business? Does email matter?

I have just been through my junk email. It caused me to stop and think for a moment whether spam is a business tool. If there is any substance behind the links in the junk mail that I receive (I've never felt the need to click on them...), obviously someone out there in cyber world thinks so.

But stopping and thinking for a minute, what were my reactions (without expletives);

• not more email
• how does it get through
• better check to make sure the junk filter hasn't captured anything I really want
• why do these people bother? Does Randy at Erogenous Pharmaceuticals really exist? (Actually, I might trademark that name.)

Email is really cheap. And it is the bane of our business and personal lives, particularly if we let it take over. I think it is really unacceptable to sit in a meeting reviewing your Blackberry/Smartphone messages rather than having the courtesy to follow the substance of the meeting and then asking for a summary or being unable to react to a question or critical point. In one organisation I worked with, it was de rigueur for colleagues to sit looking at their PDAs at the same time as holding one-to-one discussions. This happens because the speed of business lives has accelerated, and we don't have the collective presence of mind to accept that an email will wait a few hours.

Back to the spam question. It is the cheapness of email, messaging 1000s or more email addresses at the same time that makes it so attractive to these little online suppliers. If junk email were arriving from supposed reputable organisations, we would all want to know how they got our details, how we can stop the junk, and their reputation would suffer. The senders of junk mail don't have a reputation to worry about and if the get one 'sale' for every 1000 emails they send then they've probably done well (of course the 'sale' might be of details off of your PC rather than pills or potions).

Spam mail is not a legitimate business tool - I think I knew that before I started to rant, but constant communications are important in respectable business. It is getting the content and form of those communications right that is so important - an email is often harder to draft than a simple phone call or a chat around the coffe machine, and we've all seen email chains that start with a simple innocuous question that then ends up with a huge number of comments and replys, forwards, copies, blind copies etc. We're creating an unnecessary email industry, and all feeling the pressure of ensuring that we don't miss that one important email in amongst the day-to-day dross.

In managing change in the real world we always talk to people about getting the right messages, to the right people, in the right format at the right time. We need to bring people through the change, dealing with the emotions and challenges that appear - shame we don't do that in our 'normal' lives...

PS: Please let me have an email with any comments ;-)