Canned messages are lame
I received an invitation to Multiply this week from Christian Crumlish, author of The Power of Many (and, btw, the guy who I met via LinkedIn and Ryze who introduced us to our agent). Here’s what it read:
Personal message from Christian:
orkut is the suck. multiply is probably evil too, but i’m
testing the import feature….also, canned messages are lame.
how the hell are you?
Yes, he sent this to almost all his Orkut contacts. Yes, it was about the 10th invitation to Multiply I received in a week. But it still made me laugh. It still prompted me to write him and answer that last question (and ask his OK to post this). And I’ve ignored the other 9 invitations.
He’s right… canned messages ARE lame. Right here, right now, I’d like to tell every single social networking site to eliminate the canned messages. I know you think you’re making life easier on your members, but what you’re really doing is killing interest in your sites. Every single time I receive an invitation with the default canned message, unless it’s a close personal friend just going through the mechanics, I file it in the “maybe someday” file (which I usually don’t get around to).
If you’re not willing to take the time to even personalize a message to a small group of people, like Christian did above, why would you expect me to just open up my calendar and contact list to you?
Use invitations as a relationship-building tool. The only way to do that is by personalizing them. Use the canned invitation, and for everyone who’s received an invitation from that site before, you’re actually weakening the relationship, not strengthening it.
We all recognize that we’re using these sites to handle larger numbers of relationships. I still don’t want to be made to feel like a number.
Interesting that Multiply can import Orkut and Friendster contacts and their email addresses by asking you for your password on those sites. That all looks pretty dubious against their T&Cs. And it’s pretty questionable that you should give multiply your password on other sites.
But why can’t they process the lists and find the people who are already on Multiply?
Comment by Julian Bond — 8/19/2004 @ 1:54 am
Couldn’t agree with you more, Scott! In fact, I know Christian really well and the philistine STILL didn’t invite me to Multiply! Harumph.
More seriously, do we really need Yet Another Networking Site? It’s like printing up 1000 business cards just to find that you’ve dropped them all into 1000 “win a free lunch” bowls and forgotten to actually *use* your cards to network. :-)
Oh, my two cents on the generic invite topic:
http://www.intuitive.com/blog/how_not_to_connect_on_linkedin.html
Comment by Dave Taylor — 9/20/2005 @ 1:20 pm
[…] There’s just no doubt about it, canned messages are lame — no one wants to feel like a number. The messages above may be a bit over the top, but seriously, do take the time to personalize your invitations — if not for every single invite, at least put it in your own style of writing and make it appropriate to the context of the invitation. […]
Pingback by Linked Intelligence - The smart source for all things LinkedIn™ » Better Boilerplates — 1/27/2007 @ 1:46 pm
[…] Most people say you need to change the template if you want to be effective. That’s probably true if you are sending out tons of invitations to connect, especially to people that don’t know you very well. […]
Pingback by JibberJobber Blog » Blog Archive » LinkedIn Etiquette - Introductions — 2/16/2007 @ 11:34 am