Have We Mastered The CAN Spam Act

A couple of days ago I decided to give my Hotmail account a little spring cleaning. I have a few e-mail accounts, but I love GMail so much that it has been my primary for more than a year now and the others have been overlooked for quite some time.

I knew that there would be an incredible amount of spam, so I decided to hit it at it's root and unsubscribe from the routine communication. I wanted to be off their list.

The thing is that I don't know what I did to opt-in to any of these communications. I've been producing e-mail newsletters for years now, but I have an editorial background, and I only asked how people opted in to the newsletters I was working on at the time.

However I got on their lists, I was on dozens. I could only remember opting in to receive coupons from the Bon Ton two years ago. If I had known they were going to e-mail me every day about their new shoe section, one day sale, etc., I wouldn't have. Barnes & Noble does a fabulous job of communicating its coupon announcements and coupon announcements only in my opinion, and I take advantage of them often. Too often.

I wasn't suprised about all the free flight e-mails. What I couldn't believe was how many retailers were violating the CAN-SPAM Act. I had been receiving at least one e-mail per week from:

Lowes
DISH Network (Direct TV)
JCPenney
Polo RalphLauren

I knew I hadn't done anything that would make my e-mail address available for their marketing purposes. I had already spent hours unsubscribing from the Bon Ton e-mails, the National Body Challenge (I fogot I went to the Discovery Channel's Web site in an effort to lose weight in January), and a host of newsletters I had actually knowingly subscribed to and never read.

So why are international retailers like Lowes, JCPenney, and Polo RalphLauren risking getting fined? If I am reading the details of the act correctly, they aren't.

I searched the 81 pages of text for a section that discussed the opt in guidelines, but the law simply discusses what the sender must do to enable to recipient to opt out. According to the legal text:

CANSPAM protects consumers’ privacy by allowing individual email recipients to choose whether to opt-out of receiving additional commercial email messages from any particular sender and by requiring commercial email messages to clearly and conspicuously disclose the opt-out mechanism.

Can Web Content Be Created Quickly?

Anyone who takes a serious interest in their Web site knows that it is critical to add content as frequently and consistently as possible.

But as SEO expert Michael Martinez points out in "The art of optimizing with articlets," getting content from clients is about as easy as understanding the intricacies of PageRank.

It’s personally frustrating for me to see someone who is extremely articulate, passionate, and engaged in telling people about their business just freeze up when it comes to writing a few sentences a week for the Web. People who have no problem with walking into 15 strangers’ places of business every week, asking those strangers engaging questions, and providing a semi-canned spiel about what they do, what their value proposition is, and how they can help the 15 strangers deal with their pain should have no problem writing 10 sentences a week about what they do, how they helped solve someone’s pain, or how life is a little easier because of their industry.

Martinez suggests what he calls articlets, "unique, content-rich globs of information about you, your company, your services, your products or whatever that you share with other people." It sounded like a great idea...a really great idea. But then I thought about all the conversations I had with my colleagues when we discussed how to get more content on the Web sites for their print magazines. With a staff of writers, you would think it would be easy to post a couple of small things here or there. But it isn't.

The Web developer in me gives kudos to Martinez. It is an incredible idea and it makes a lot of sense. But the professional writer and pragmatist in me knows that quality content cannot be created quickly. In person, a representative from IBM may have only one opportunity to make an impression on his peers. But on the Web, where what that person has to say is in some ways permanent, he will want to take the time to make sure he is saying what he really has to say. And when he is finished PR, marketing, and maybe even legal will want to take a look at it.

Content On Many Government Websites In The Public Domain

As a web content developer who has looked high and low for internal and external sources of website content, I was very pleased to learn recently about a free source of quality content.

Apparently, works prepared by employees of the U.S. government are in the public domain, including website content.

According to the Commerce, Energy, NASA, Defense Information Managers Group:

In accordance with 17 USC §10571, works prepared by government employees as part of their official duties are not subject to copyright protection in the U.S. (See FAQ Sections 3.1.1 and 3.1.2). This applies to government employee prepared works posted to government Web sites and to the government website itself if government employees as part of their official duties prepare it.

There is a catch. Not all content on government websites is created and/or prepared by government employees. Government websites can contain:

• Copyrighted text that the government entity is licensing from the copyright owner
  
• Logos, images, graphics created by a contractor (which are subject to copyright)
  
• Syndicated news briefs that come from a website that may or may not copyright their content

Some sites, like the National Institute of Health's MedLine Plus, have pages that make a distinction between copyrighted and public domain content on various pages. Others provide attribution on pages that feature copyright content.

I recommend checking with the government entity if you are going to use a significant amount of content. When I did they were thrilled to share their content.

Make Your Web Content Work For You

I read an article on the A List Apart website today that made me think of that ING Direct commercial for their Orange savings account. You know the one - "put your money to work for you."

The author said how important it is for web writers to "[insist] that every chunk of text on the site is doing something concrete." I agree. But I know that on websites, EVERY word counts. 

Why?

Users don't read website text. They scan it. The great web usability expert Jakob Nielsen explains that today's Internet users are increasingly using search engines to find specific information. When these information foragers visit a webpage they quickly scan it for information - then move on to another website. Concise, scannable text puts that information in front of users, Nielsen says. 

Cutting words can be difficult, but if it isn't a keyword it isn't going to work for you. That should make editing a little easier. 

Is Google So Hard To Find?

How difficult is it to perform a search on Google? Usability expert Jacob Nielsen posed this question in the March 17, 2008 edition of his weekly e-mail newsletter Alertbox.

Apparently the process of getting to the search engine -- not the act of performing the search itself -- was unattainable for 24% of the participants in Nielson's latest round of usability research. That's a big number.

So what happened? Were the users asked to type in the domain? If the testing was done recently this pesky little site may have been an issue. I would highly doubt that the participants had any knowledge about top-level-domains.

Nielson offers little information about how the study was conducted. The one point he did make was that his team was "recruiting above-average users, so the success rate across all Internet users is probably lower than our finding." Says Nielson:

On the one hand, 76% is a high success rate. On the other hand, getting to Google is a very simple task.

A VERY simple task. I recently wrote about Google's redesign of their advanced search page. In that post I said that most users don't fully understand how a search engine works in the first place.

The implications of this study could be huge. What does it mean for Web developers, designers, etc. if we learn that the average user still doesn't know how to use, for instance, the Web browser. If Google is so hard to find, what does it mean for the rest of us?