Causes New Features: Automated Welcomes To New Members - Good Relationship Building or Viral Spam?

Last year, one thing that annoyed me about Causes, that it was time consuming to welcome new members and thank them personally once they joined or donated to the Cause.    It's an important principle of building online community - greeting new members. 

I noticed that Causes now has an administrative feature that when you join a Cause, you can receive a thank you note as a wall post.  So, presumably this helps spread the word about your Cause virally on Facebook.

Yesterday, colleague Dave Pentecost suggested on a previous post about Facebook Connect in the comments that this automated spreading of messages as a form of spam.

It's significant that your first awareness of this was as a result of a purchase, and remarkable that you decided to participate in spamming your friends, even for a good cause.

We are entering a post-consumer phase of our economy and we can expect to see both increased promotion of these schemes to map our connections and graph our personal marketing power, and a backlash against the use of social networks to sell things to us. If I receive an automated notice of what a "friend" has purchased I will likely remove myself from the network in question, and question the friendship. Then again, I am probably not the demographic that is targeted. I find it hard to accept these robotic simulations of intimacy, where others may find it normal and helpful.

I am wondering when the backlash will come and people will stop paying attention to "automated" messages like that - even for good causes.  When will they just become ads to be tuned out? 

Comments

[Sara]

I wouldn't necessarily look at an automated thank you as spam, afterall, I've joined the Cause/Group. It does, however, seem tacky. It only takes a moment to personalize a thank you.

If I discovered one day that I had scores of discussions and wall posts for my nonprofit to respond to, I'd be thrilled. I've been struggling with how fleeting the interaction on Facebook can be - it seems many people sign up, and that's the end of the interaction. The cause lives in some dark corner of their profile. The least I can do is send a simple thank you in the beginning!

[Maha Chehlaoui]

Interesting- I am working with Call2Action. It is a website that uses video content culled from various sources to engage and motivate viewers to create change and empower them with tools to help. One thing we are hammering out is auto messaging- thank yous for people signing up as supporters for non-profits, and thank yous to people for taking actions (participating in a letter campaign or a pledge or a petition, for example).
We are thinking of making the auto message editable so the creator of the action or manager of an orgs profile can at least make it sound less robotic and put some useful info in there beyond 'Hey thanks for playing".
I am guessing a lot of nonprofits may not be checking in on their various online "homes" regularly and want each contribution to be immediately acknowledged... That is why we want to offer it. Though my gut says a quick and simple personalized email is the way to go.

Don't you think there is a difference between an automated thank you that also serves the purpose of letting you know you successfully committed an action, vs. n automated message telling you a friend just bought some junk somewhere online?

[Britt Bravo]

Hey Beth,

The thank you isn't really automated. I can choose whether to thank you or not, whether to post the thank you to your profile or not, and whether to write a personal note with the thank you template or not.

Personally, I like that it makes it easy for me to thank people. I usually choose to post it on the person's profile so that their peeps can see what a good egg they are for joining the Cause. Of course I hope that other people will join the Cause as well. And I always write a little personal note in the automated message.

[Beth Kanter]

Britt:

You ever the great wordsmith. I probably selected the wrong word "automated" to describe this ... more precisely integrated into the work flow is probably better.

Last year, everytime someone joined a Cause - I had to click through to the person's profile. If I wasn't friends, make friends. Then, I could write a public thank you from scratch on their wall. These work flow steps are no part of the application features which save a lot of time.

B