Jigsaw: A Puzzle that DOESN'T Fit
I knew there was a company called jigsaw.com. I assumed it was for puzzle lovers. Then I stumbled on my colleague David Batstone’s blog entry about it. (Author of the WAG newsletter and the Right reality blog, David is another blogger on corporate ethics; I’ve been on his newsletter list for a couple of years.)
To say I was horrified is an understatement. This company actually pays people to gather business cards and punch the information into a for-sale database!
I don’t know about you, but I find that extremely creepy. I give a business card to someone because I’m interested in facilitating that person’s ability to stay in touch with me. As public as I am, and I’m pretty public, I don’t really want people exploiting me by selling my contact info. As it is, I am cursed, as an early adopter on the Internet, with the dubious honor of being included on every blankety-blank list of contacts that spammers buy and sell already.
Let me say categorically that if I ever find out that someone has mined my information in that way, I would *never* do business with that person again. It is an invasion of privacy and a very bad business model.
A lifelong activist, profitability and marketing specialist Shel Horowitz’s mission is to fix crises like hunger, poverty, racism, war, and catastrophic climate change—by showing the business world how fixing them can make a profit. An author, international speaker, and TEDx Talker, his award-winning 10th book, Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, lays out a blueprint for creating and MARKETING those profitable change-making products and services. He is happy to help you craft your messaging and develop profit strategies. Learn more (and download excerpts from the book) at http://goingbeyondsustainability.com
wow! jigsaw takes the open source/wisdom of crowds/social networking concepts to a whole different and dubious level. Yet as with so much that’s new, though, they’re trying to monetize something that’s really not supposed to be a money transaction (at least not initially)–namely the business card exchange…
but they’re not the only ones willing to sell info about you to others. Back in December, marketing research firm Umbria announced Umbria Connect, a program where they’d gather sell the urls of bloggers for a certain fee (in groups of 25.) The urls are sold to marketers so that marketers would have a pre-screened group of bloggers for word-of-mouth marketing campaigns. Now, I have no problem with womm, but I do have a bit of a problem with someone selling my url to someone else for that specific purpose. It’s just not cool.
wow! jigsaw takes the open source/wisdom of crowds/social networking concepts to a whole different and dubious level. Yet as with so much that’s new, though, they’re trying to monetize something that’s really not supposed to be a money transaction (at least not initially)–namely the business card exchange…
but they’re not the only ones willing to sell info about you to others. Back in December, marketing research firm Umbria announced Umbria Connect, a program where they’d gather sell the urls of bloggers for a certain fee (in groups of 25.) The urls are sold to marketers so that marketers would have a pre-screened group of bloggers for word-of-mouth marketing campaigns. Now, I have no problem with womm, but I do have a bit of a problem with someone selling my url to someone else for that specific purpose. It’s just not cool.