Lost in Translation

Imagine that you have a large DVD collection, all of which have been given to you by well-meaning friends. Your collection requires several shelves. Each DVD case has a unique name printed on it by the friend who gave it to you, but the names are things like “movie” and “My Movie” and, if you’re incredibly lucky, “AScorseseMovie”. Every time you want to watch a movie, you have to figure out which one it is, and you have to do that by putting them into the DVD player and seeing what title screen comes up. If you’re feeling particularly enterprising you can then write the real name on the cover with a Magic Marker, but most of the time, frankly, you just want to watch a goddamn movie and can barely be bothered to put the ones you don’t want to watch back in their cases.

I download a lot of ebooks. Right now I have 238 PDFs in my “ebooks” directory, and that’s not counting the ones that I’ve downloaded but haven’t sorted yet (which is in the double digits). I’ve read most of the ones in “ebooks” – I’d say about 60% – and none of the ones in “Downloads”. The ones that I’ve downloaded but not sorted yet often have names like – I am not making this up – “download.pdf” and “My eBook.pdf” and “blogging.pdf”. These are not helpful names. These are names that are easy and convenient for the producer but have little to no bearing on the content or the source and are therefore of little to no value to the consumer.

Why is this so common? Because it’s easy and convenient for the producer. Maybe the producer assumes you’ll be reading it right away, so the knowledge of what PDF it is will be fresh; or you’ll be reading it in a browser, so the filename won’t really matter; or that this is the only ebook you’ve ever downloaded (believe it or not, I know one producer who relies on that).

But the truth is, people Save Link As… and then forget about it. Once a week when they clean up their Downloads folder they find “mygreatpdf.pdf” and decide to delete it so they’ll have the space for more downloaded episodes of “Laverne and Shirley”. Your ebook doesn’t get read, because your target reader doesn’t remember what it is, or from whom they got it, or why they even have it in the first place.

The important part:

Make sure the name of your ebook (or audio file or worksheet or whatever) is an accurate reflection of both the source and the content of the file. Sure, the consumer could rename the file to whatever she wants. But that requires opening the file, finding the name of the content (actually not always very easy), finding the name of the author, closing the file (since Acrobat won’t let you modify an open PDF), and renaming the file (“I double-click on the name to rename it and it just opens the damn file again“). Why take the risk that she’ll just say “eh, can’t have been that important” and delete it? It is trivial effort on your part when you’re making the file – you have to give it a name, after all, and you may as well give it a useful one – and significant effort when your reader is looking at the file.

1. Today I signed up for Pam Slim and Charlie Gilkey‘s free teleclass, “Thinking Big, Acting Small”. It’s a promo for their Lift-Off Retreat for small business owners, and since I know (at least, know of) and respect both Pam and Charlie, I signed up.

---

2. Lots of people, including Holly, use a company called AWeber to manage their email mailing lists. It’s fast, full-featured, and reliable, and I see no reason not to use it, assuming that you can afford the monthly fee. (Right at the moment they’re running a promotion that gives you the first month for $1, cancel anytime – and I’m not getting anything for telling you that, by the way.) It automates most of the work for you. All you have to do is set up the list with their system and then send out emails, and they deal with the rest. They’ll even give you a form that you can put on your website; when people fill the form out, they get added to your mailing list. Easy, no work, as my friend Mickey is wont to say.

AWeber also does a good job of keeping track of who’s signed up for your mailing lists and when they signed up – and you can make as many lists as you want, and put the subscribers from one list into another list, such that you can have superlists and sublists and huge varieties of functionality regarding how readers get their information from you.

---

3. Perhaps you can see where I’m going with this.

Since AWeber does a good job of handling subscriber lists, it makes a certain degree of sense to use their services in other areas where you want to keep track of who’s signed up for something you’re offering. In this case, Pam and Charlie decided that an AWeber list would be a good way to keep track of the people who have signed up for their free class. When you fill out the sign-up form on their website, you’re taken through to AWeber, which puts you on the compassion09 subscription list and sends you a confirmation email, and then, once you’ve confirmed, another email with details for the class.

This is all well and good.

Except that nowhere on their page about the class, or in either the confirmation email or the details email, do Pam and Charlie tell you that what you’re really doing is signing up for a mailing list. It’s all about signing up for the teleclass. To most people, that means “give me the details, let me attend, then disappear”. If Pam and Charlie start sending follow-up emails, they’re going to come as a surprise. The only reason I knew about it was because I have experience with AWeber and because I’ve been burned by signing up for teleclasses when they were just an excuse to get me on an email marketing list.

I did a quick poll on Twitter: “Show of hands: if someone gives you their email address, is it cool to sign them up for an email list w/o saying that’s what you’re doing?” The universal response was “absolutely not”. I tend to agree. It’s neither honest nor ethical to place someone on a mailing list without their knowledge or consent. That’s what spammers do.

I don’t know what Pam and Charlie are going to do with the email addresses they’ve collected. I really want it to be true that their intent really, truly is to just use them to send out information about the call and then destroy the list when they’re finished, because I trust them. But I’ve been burned before by people I thought I trusted, and since they’re using a mailing list to collect the information, and given that AWeber had a security leak a few weeks ago, it really behooves them – and anyone else using a mailing list as a back-end for teleclass/ebook/etc. sign-up – to put a disclaimer on their page: “By filling this out, you’re signing up for a mailing list. Don’t worry, it’s just how we’re keeping track of who’s signed up for the class. As soon as the class is over, the mailing list goes away.” If you think people aren’t going to sign up if they see it’s a mailing list, find another way to do the sign-ups. Honesty is the only way here, guys, and omission is just as big a lie as commission in this case.