Last month Google added a small update to Google+'s messaging capability that allows users to send and receive emails from any other Google+ connection even if they have never exchanged email addresses. This is not exactly new. Anyone familiar with LinkedIn and Facebook will be used to receiving unsolicited messages all the time. They're called 'friend requests' or 'request to connect.' The minute we accept one of these requests we allow that person to continue sending us messages social media whether we want them or not. The only difference with Google+ is that these messages will now start to fill up your Gmail account.
Of course the move has a number of positives from a social media perspective. It makes the Google+ social network more relevant and user friendly and helps Google keep pace with rival social networks like Facebook.
Whether it's a good move for business depends very much upon your point of view. There's no denying that it's a great help to sales and marketing activities. A small business will often want to reach out to potential prospects but unless they have their email address they will either have to carry out extensive research online or pay some third party do to it for them. At a stroke Google is giving small businesses a handy way to send their sales pitch directly to their prospect database. Furthermore Google+ emails will end up in a completely separate 'social' folder where the receiver can quickly determine which mails they want to open and those they don't.
So what's the difference between a bona fide email campaign and spam? It simply comes down to volume and type of content. An email marketing campaign usually comprises a controlled burst of emails to a few hundred carefully targeted email addresses. Companies pay good money for prospect lists and in order to make the best possible return on that investment they take great care to use it within the context of a genuine marketing promotion. Real spam still makes up 65-70% of all global email traffic and is sent out en mass to an indiscriminate number of addresses pushing penny stocks , pharmaceutical products and so on.
Since the new Google+ feature can allow you to pick off a random set of addresses this opens up the potential for it to be abused. People may be tempted to bombard random recipients with messages without proper consideration for their experience or needs. It therefore represents a business and personal risk in that such unsolicited emails are the ones most likely to contain malicious content.
One of the best ways for a small business to protect itself from malicious email and spam is with the AVG Email Security Service (ESS) available within AVG CloudCare. First, ESS protects customers from spam and malicious content such as trojans, phishing and other social engineering techniques. Second, it is a Security-as-a-Service application which means unwanted content is detected and cleansed by our servers long before it reaches your customer regardless of whether they try to access it in the office using something like Office Exchange or while out and about via a mobile device. In addition to keeping your business protected ESS also helps to improve productivity by keeping spam volumes down. If a user spends just 15 minutes a day managing their spam then that's a productivity loss of 1.25 hours per user, per week - so 20 users are losing 30 hours a week (that's nearly a whole working week lost) just managing useless and often malicious content.
ESS can also help those businesses who frequently run email marketing campaigns. It has the ability to create an Address-on-the-Fly (AOTF). The user can create any number of temporary email aliases, say for different email campaigns. Simple to administer, AOTF does not require the user to adapt the settings of their email client. Aliases save you from having to share your primary address from public or uncontrolled disclosures that may result in new sources of spam. They even allow you to easily work out the relative effectiveness of different campaigns. All AOTFs automatically resolve to the user's single inbox.
This popular capability provides an effective means of controlling inbox access, blocking spam, making phishing attacks immediately self-evident and preserving the long-term integrity of the user's primary email address. IT professionals and marketers have long recognized the value of using multiple email addresses. In fact, many consumers now employ multiple addresses, although by maintaining separate email accounts. AOTF brings the power of the technique to a single inbox, in a fully automated fashion.
In conclusion, while it may bring some initial benefit, regular use of Google+'s new feature for business activities such as email marketing might eventually result in an increase in spam volumes. And as we have discussed more spam means an increased risk of infection and more lost productivity so, on balance, it's not that good for business. There are much more effective applications available to marketers. AVG CloudCare's ESS can help marketers and protect the business at the same time.
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