Jigsaw IS evil
T. writes about Jigsaw (think of it as a shared Plaxo for sales-folk)
It seems a pretty good idea to me; keep users honest by the points system and you might get a win-win.
I'm sure they'll make a lot of money. In his interview with Guy Kawasaki, CEO Jim Fowler says they'll remove info if
OK, you could say that Jigsaw just opens up the market in contact data to all comers, and that makes it fair for everyone. It also provides a very handy way for cold calling and spamming to grow exponentially. I already waste too much of my time fending off cold callers. So Jigsaw is paying subscribers to waste my time. In effect, my firm is funding Jigsaw.
A plausible ethical way of running a similar business would be to email someone when their contact details are put on the system, inviting them to have them erased.
It's a shame Jigsaw aren't based where the Data Protection folks here in England can get at 'em.
Fire axes in their data centre sounds like a satisfying alternative.
It seems a pretty good idea to me; keep users honest by the points system and you might get a win-win.
I'm sure they'll make a lot of money. In his interview with Guy Kawasaki, CEO Jim Fowler says they'll remove info if
the information is proven to have been added in violation of the law
The information is proven to have been added in violation of a non disclosure or employment agreement
OK, you could say that Jigsaw just opens up the market in contact data to all comers, and that makes it fair for everyone. It also provides a very handy way for cold calling and spamming to grow exponentially. I already waste too much of my time fending off cold callers. So Jigsaw is paying subscribers to waste my time. In effect, my firm is funding Jigsaw.
A plausible ethical way of running a similar business would be to email someone when their contact details are put on the system, inviting them to have them erased.
It's a shame Jigsaw aren't based where the Data Protection folks here in England can get at 'em.
Fire axes in their data centre sounds like a satisfying alternative.
posted by rmcubed at 1:20 pm
2 Comments:
Thanks for the post! Just thought we here at Jigsaw might respond with "Why is Jigsaw ethical":
- Sales activity is the engine of commerce and economy.
- For most small companies who are relatively unknown, the only way to get their products to market is through a sales team.
- Before Jigsaw, most sales reps spend 75% of their time calling people who don’t care about their products. At best, sales reps call 25 people to get to 1 right person. This is the reason for people being annoyed, as most people are annoyed when they are offered products they don’t care about.
- With Jigsaw, sales reps can now pinpoint the right persons to call. In most cases, with Jigsaw a sales rep call 2 to 3 people to get to the right person. This reduces the volume of unwanted calls, saving time on both the callers and the call recipients.
- This in turn helps accelerate sales activities, hence accelerating overall commerce
- In short, Jigsaw helps accelerate commerce, particularly for upstarts, small, and medium-sized companies, which makes up more than half of US GDP.
Again, thanks for the lively debate!
-- Marc Parrish, VP of Marketing, Jigsaw.
Marc's argument here doesn't hold water.
Firstly, most of the unsolicited sales calls I get are for things I might in principle be interested in, such as IT staff, printers, servers, software products. What annoys me is not that I'm never interested in such products, but that I'm not interested in those products NOW, or (worse) that the sales calls are interrupting me thinking about something else. So the idea of being called by many more sales people about products I might - at some stage in my life - be interested in does not appeal. When I need about particular products I like to go out and shop around for them.
The overall tenet of Marc's argument (commerce is good for the country, sales activity accelerates commerce, Jigsaw accelerates sales activity, ergo Jigsaw is ethical) just does not hold water.
1) There are plenty of things that might accelerate commerce. That doesn't mean they're ethical. For example, we might legalise unsolicited junk email. Or we might do away with benefits for the needy and put the money into tax cuts for companies or those with greater spending power. Or we might pay underage workers to work in sweatshops in countries with poor labour policies and visibility. Oh no, that's right, we already do that :-> Anyway, the point is not everything that accelerates commerce is ethical.
2) There is a cost to companies of fielding sales calls. Every minute a sales person takes of my time is a minute I am not producing value for my company. Assuming that most folks are like me, and are hard to sell to when they're not actually looking, then if (as I would expect), wide-spread take-up of Jigsaw leads to an upsurge in overall call volumes, then there is a cost there to offset against his accelerated commerce. What the balance is, I've no idea.
When it comes down to it, what's unethical about Jigsaw is that I have no control over the information being published about me, and that information is being widely publicised and sold to a very wide group of people.
Got to hand it to Jigsaw in this respect though - if they made it to my blog, they made it to every blog on the planet.
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