The other day, I received an email (along with pretty much every other staff and faculty member) that frankly looked a lot like spam, but which is apparently a real thing. The subject line was “Fwd: “Hello! A new exciting program you don’t want to miss!” which in my mind suggests a message from one of those frequent emails from Nigeria offering me a “unique opportunity.” But since it was sent from EMU Staff Human Resources, I read on.
“Social Media’s Compelling Pull!!!” is a workshop/training session of some sort sponsored by the EMU College of Business and something called The Professional Education Center. At least that’s my guess– I’m not entirely sure. The email includes a list of five different people who work locally as marketing and public relations, along with a journalist from annarbor.com (Nathan Bomey), all of whom will be speaking at this event. And according to the email, the event itself will include a panel discussion, “Q&A,case study, and take-home tips,” and it promises to be “jam-packed.”
The regular cost for attending this is $179, but for you, EMU staff and faculty, it is $159! That’s over a 10% discount!!!
Now, I don’t know if this is worth it or not for potential participants, though I have to say that I’m a little dubious. I mean, it all seems a little vague to me, and the spam-like subject line of this email does little to establish the credibility for this group’s experiences and abilities to teach about how to communicate and market with “social media” (which includes stuff like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Digg, etc.). And from my “writing teacher” perspective, multiple exclamation points never looks good.
But what I am wondering about for now is the appropriateness for sending this email around at all. I guess my objection is the charge of $159 and what I presume is this group’s desire to make money. I’m assuming that the powers that be at EMU would not be happy with me if I mass emailed faculty and staff to drum up interest in some sort of “side business” or to offer my editing services or to sell my house. I’m also assuming that if I asked someone in HR to forward a message like this to everyone on campus, the powers that be in HR would say no.
So, I’m wondering: why is it okay for this email to be sent around from EMU’s Human Resources office?
Sitedad, you ask good questions about this apparently university wide bit of internally generated spam; very odd, as it’s spam that seems to be about an event that is a mixture of something offered by internal EMU sources as well as outsiders to the University. Who is in charge of it, and why is HR involved in this? Over the years, and quite recently too, I’ve heard of many EMU activities that could not be promoted through the University email system, because they were not “official” enough. So who is now making these decisions now? And the idea that social networking is so novel or complex a thing that the university needs to provide educational programs, for a fee, on social networking is enough to make any reasonably well informed university community member doubt the validity of this program. It may have great content. So do thousands of EMU sponsored workshops and classes that do not get promoted through our email system. Strange indeed. I made one phone call asking about it, never got a call back.