Full Circle Associates

A while back I posted a little gripe about Plaxo. Some days afterwards I received an email from Stacy Martin from Plaxo. (Smart people - they read blogs!) Stacy's email exemplified listening to what a user said, in this case me, in my blog post. Stacy asked permission to engage with me. I could opt out, in this case!

We went back and forth a few times, Stacy asking some specific questions to ascertain what I experienced, then responding from Plaxo's position. Ask first, answer second. Another good practice!

What I found remarkable was the non judgemental tone of Stacy's emails and the even response. It was not defensive. It was informative. It did not whitewash problems, but put them in context and explained what the company had and was doing about them.

Now, I'm not a likely user of Plaxo (I'm one of those who doesn't use Outlook, I resist, etc.), but some of you may be current or potential users and the information seems useful. I received Stacy's permission to share our correspondence here in my blog.

At 10:43 AM 9/1/2006, you wrote:
Hi Nancy,

My name is Stacy Martin and I am the Privacy Officer at Plaxo. I hope you don't mind me reaching out to you like this. I used to do a lot of blogging and responding to people with questions and issues regarding Plaxo, but stopped doing that after finding that people often misinterpreted the action as some type of PR stunt. This is not a PR stunt, so I now try to be more selective with responses and prefer to reach out directly to people, when possible.

I was looking over some recent blogs that mentioned Plaxo and your's caught my interest. You mentioned you are a consultant and like experimenting with new things, but it appears there is sufficient doubt in your mind to discourage you away from trying Plaxo.

If I may, I'd like to offer my time to address any concerns or questions you may have. You mentioned that you continue to receive "Plaxo spam". I'd be happy to discuss these messages with you - where they came from, who sent them, why they were sent to you, as well as how to stop receiving them, as well as any other issue you have with Plaxo. Perhaps I can provide you sufficient facts and answers so you can get a much better understanding about Plaxo and what someone is getting into when they use Plaxo.

Please let me know if you are interested.

Thank you,

Stacy Martin

Plaxo - Your Internet Address Book
Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer Plaxo, Inc.
1300 Crittenden Lane
Suite 300
Mountain View, CA. 94043
smartin at plaxo dot com

I responded with my particulars, then Stacy replied. I have removed the name of the person I referenced for their privacy.

At 03:20 PM 9/5/2006, you wrote:
Hi Nancy.

Thank you for your response. I apologize for my lengthy reply below, but I wanted to best address your concerns as much as possible. As I may have mentioned, it is not my intent to "change anyone's" mind, but simply add to the discussion and understanding. I've tried to address each issue separately below.


> 1. you had to register for the service to opt out of other people sending you notices. So in effect, if your colleagues or friends use plaxo and you don't want their notices, you must
> register to opt out. So you have in effect, opted me in without my permission.

I want to make sure I understand what you are saying. By "opted in without permission", you mean you were "opted-in" to receive notices from Plaxo members without being asked if you wanted to receive those notices. Is this correct?

If so, I would agree this is has been a difficult problem for us to address. From one perspective, Plaxo is not the actual sender of these notices. The notices (known as update requests) are being sent by the actual Plaxo members, similar to them sending you an email. As with normal email, the member has your email address and they have chosen to send you an update request. The update request includes a personalized message from the member if included, or otherwise contains default text provided by Plaxo. As you know, email itself has no 'opt-in' mechanism. If someone has your email, they have the ability to send you an email message, so this is why you saw no 'opt-in' mechanism provided with these update request. Instead, we relied up the proper etiquette of the Plaxo member, as for any email message.

But I do agree there are problems. Because the email are processed through Plaxo, nicely formatted, include transactional links, and often times contained default "canned" text, these emails can come across as impersonal and programmatically generated. Many people assumed they were sent automatically by Plaxo, without the knowledge and consent of the Plaxo member, and therefore in violation of the contact's privacy.

But while it is the actual member sending the update requests, we do acknowledge problems in how this "update request" feature was provided. We made it too easy for members to send to everyone in their address book and failed to put in place proper throttling controls. This lead to people sending update request to contacts in their address book whom they had very little association with and who often did not recognize the member. We encouraged users to use the "update request" feature too early in their Plaxo membership, before they truly had a full appreciation for how Plaxo worked. This also meant unnecessary update requests being sent.

We've tried to correct these issues as we've gone along. We no longer include our Update Contact Wizard during our registration flow and we limit the number of requests someone can send at one time. Members are encouraged to send personalized update requests to people and only to people they truly know and wish to stay in touch with. Since implementing many of these controls, we've seen the number of update request sent by member decrease tremendously.

But of course, these changes don't address the fundamental issue you may feel that people should "opt-in" to receiving these notices. I'm afraid I don't see a true solution for that problem since it is inherent to email, in general. We've tried to mitigate things by providing the 'opt-out' capability which instructs us, as the service provider, to block messages any/all of our members may be attempted to send to your email address.

But hopefully, by requiring the messages to be more personalized as with normal email messages, reducing the "Plaxo-branding" within the emails, and being more intelligent about whom update requests can be sent to, the perception of these emails will change and this will be a lesser problem. But I also understand that as long as "sending email" through Plaxo is possible, this will always be an issue for some.


> 2. I had a man who kept sending me things even though I asked him repeatedly not to (he spammed me in other ways.) He wrote to you repeatedly to find out why, even after
> removing me from his list, I still got messages and no one ever replied to him. Eventually they stopped. Neither of us knew why. The person was XXXX.

Do you have XXXX's email address? I can look up any correspondence he's submitted to our Support team as well as why you've continue to receive messages from him even after he has removed you from his address book.

> 3. The tool to send messages from your email program seems to overreach. I'm always getting apology messages from friends who tried to use it and it did unexpected things.

I agree. Similar to question #1 above, I felt there were a number of implementation issues that caused the Update Contact Wizard (UCW) to overreach and send unnecessary/unwanted update requests. For example,
- Select All used to be the default option when running the UCW. This no longer the case.
- People were prompted to run the UCW soon after joining Plaxo. This is no longer the case.
- People were asked weekly if they wished to run the UCW. This is no longer the case.
- The UCW could find contacts directly from your emails but were not in your address book, and allow you to send update request emails to these contacts. This is no longer the case.
- Previously, a member could send update request emails to the same person over and over again, even if the previous requests went unresponded. This is no longer the case.

In addition to these and other implementation changes, we continue to provide the 'opt-out' mechanism that allows an update request recipient to choose not to receive further messages from a specific member or all Plaxo members.

Thank you again for the opportunity to correspond. Should you have further questions or comments, please don't hesitate to contact me directly

Regards,

Stacy Martin
Plaxo Privacy Officer

I then thanked Stacy in an email for the informative response, and asked if I could blog our correspondence and was given permission. So now you can learn what I learned. And I like to learn. And I do appreciate it when someone listens. Thanks, Stacy.