Lately I’ve been receiving invitations from Skype and LinkedIn to participate in surveys (hosted by my favorite SurveyMonkey). The most recent arrived Monday and the email read:
mIchael,
Thanks for responding to our recent message and survey. . .
Now I’m all for colorful spellings (and misspellings) of my name but when I first read this I thought it was spam that had somehow escaped the filter. I chalked it up to having to send many of these out. The other thing that bothered me about this email is that it lacked any branding, which again, made it look like spam. I clicked the link and started answering a short list of scheduling questions. I then came to the NDA (top right) and it was a scanned image of the NDA. The image was a little blurry and very crooked.
Now if this were a social network that billed itself as something other than professional; I would have thought nothing of it. Unfortunately this is LinkedIn. A company that has gone out of its way to show that it is the network for professionals. This is the kind of thing that reduces brand equity and at the very least a is a lost opportunity. A little bit at a time. I will have to say that this is not the first time LinkedIn has done something that made me scratch my head. The ever popular “log out twice” process is a great way to annoy the hell out of those that use the service.
Note to marketers: Any interruption in user flow should be avoided.
This is not terminal and yet it is indicative of how a business views its users. At one point they are reaching out to users for feedback (smart) and then showing you indirectly how much they value you (not smart). I’m curious to see how the panel goes. It’s this Thursday.
