Imagine Your Reality

I frequently offer classes and one of the dilemmas I always encounter is using the invite feature on Linkedin and Facebook. On the one hand, I want people to know about my classes, and on the other hand I also recognize that some people will simply not want another email in their inbox. Indeed, sometimes I get irritated when I get requested to be a fan for a site or for an event, especially if the person is inviting me and it’s not one I can go to, because it’s far away.

The truth is that while posting events is helpful, there’s a danger of overdoing it and consequently spamming people. Those same people will start delete your mails, ignore you, and otherwise wish that you would go away. So what do you do? You want to put your events out there and tell people about them, but you also don’t want those same people to ignore you.

I’ve lately been re-thinking how I do my invitations. I still think it’s useful to post events on facebook and linkedin, but instead of taking a hard approach of blasting people with invitations, it may be useful to take a softer approach and post a link to the event every so often without directly mailing people. True you can’t guarantee those people will look at the events, but if you off as a spammer they won’t look at it anyway. You have to weigh the potential of spamming people vs actually engaging them.

The reality is that its very easy to cross the line from telling people about what you do to spamming them. You’ve got to be willing to refine your strategy if you find that the results it produces end up being the opposite of what you wanted.