Prevent value subtraction--be a cyber cynic

Agency Sales, Sep 2001 by Stuart, Katherine a

Time is the battlefield of the century. Think of all the campaigns various entities wage on your time - sales calls, forecasting, competitive intelligence, factory visits, "administrivia," homework, soccer games, Mom/Dad's taxi service, backyard barbecues, camp-outs, (your list here).

Increasingly, everybody from the rep to the manufacturer to the little kid with the lemonade stand is being pressed to "add value." One way to add value that often goes unnoticed is to prevent "value subtraction," which is any process or event that detracts from your perceived image of added value.

For example, e-mail has been shown in multiple surveys to be the biggest time waster executives face. If you can put a lid on junk e-mail before it gets out of your office, you can save your business partners, be they manufacturers, distributors or agents, inestimable time and effort, thereby staving off value subtraction.

Chain E-Mails and Online Petitions

While these are not as prevalent-4t work as they are at, private e-mail addresses, your share of these little gems (accent denotes gritted teeth) will enter your emailbox. Contrary to what they all maintain, your limbs will not fall off, your life will not be dramatically shortened, nor will you turn into Scrooge if you do not pass them on to everyone you know in the next five nanoseconds.

Potential chain passers would be well advised to note that not all of these pests are harmless. Web site programmer/designer Tom Pasawicz, who in his spare time hosts a witty, excellent hoax-- busting web site (see Diamondback.com site in box on page 30), maintains: "Con artists on the net are finding better ways to make money off the gullibility of well-- meaning people. The latest scam is online petitions.

"You are presented with some legitimate sounding cause and told that when a million people sign the petition, it will be presented to some organization or perhaps an elected official. Some of these petitions are real, but lately there have been petitions popping up on the web with a more sinister purpose - they are collecting e-mail addresses to sell to spammers (senders of "spam," the Internet equivalent of junk mail), often porn sites.

"So while you think you are being a good 'Netizen' by sending all your friends an important petition to sign, in fact you are helping some low-life make a buck while getting your unsuspecting friends signed up for a ton of unwanted junk e-mail, much of it of an adult nature."

Now you would think you could combat the problem by simply clicking "unsubscribe" each time you get one of these e-mails. Not so simple, says Pasawicz, because "once you are on those lists you can't get off - responding with a 'remove' message only informs them that they have a warm body at your e-mail address reading the spam, which increases the value of their list. A list of people who will actually open spam email and respond to it is a valuable commodity which will be sold from spammer to spammer. The 'fresher' the list, the more it's worth. Hence the fake 'petition' pages." Not to mention the fact that each piece of garbage you open and attempt to unsubscribe to wastes valuable time.

Don't panic. If you get stuck on one (or likely more) of these lists, here's what you can do. Most of the major e-mail management programs have "junk mail folders" into which you copy the spam. Your e-mail manager recognizes the address and blocks the mail next time they try to spam you. If your e-mail program doesn't have one of these folders, it will handle junk mail another way. Check "junk mail" on the help menu to see how your program handles spam.

A final note on chain mail -- every so often you get a chain mail that has a good story, a classic joke or some other bit of material that you think might genuinely benefit one or more readers. If you feel a need to pass it on, cut it out and paste it into your word processor, where the find and replace feature will make it much easier to edit out all those annoying carats, and you can put the kibosh on those irritating little "guilt trips" that always seem to be tacked onto the end of the message. Then delete all the forwarding addresses, re-select and cut the story again, paste it into a new e-mail window, and send. That way it's a whole new e-mail that has you, not some sleazy spammer, as its origin.

Virus Warning Hoaxes

Hoaxes are usually easy to recognize (see box to the right). While these are not as immediately damaging as the actual viruses discussed below, they do take their toll on your reader's and your time, your credibility and the Internet's bandwidth, or capacity.

Think of bandwidth in terms of lanes on a freeway. If you watch reruns of '60s shows like Dragnet and Get Smart, it's almost comical how light the traffic is when they show the freeways. Nowadays, of course, many, many times more cars line (a nicer word for jam) the same amount of freeway space. Clogging up bandwidth with unnecessary e-mails is the surest way to add cars to the virtual freeway traffic jam.