Wednesday, May 2, 2007By: J.F. Sullivan, VP Marketing
For months now, vendors have been pushing the topic of monitoring and maintaining your online reputation. In the very cottage industry of email, it seems there are more companies springing up to inform you about your online reputation than photographers gathered around Alec Baldwin these days. Why is that?
The fact is, much of what folks refer to as reputation is not a new thing, it has existed for years. Blacklists were always a form of negative reputation. Whitelists, conversely, sprung up as a form of positive reputation. ISPs have been holding the axe of user complaints, aka feedback reputation, over the heads of senders for years now as a way of determining the "goodness" of an emailer. Recent announcements have repositioned anti-spam content analysis vendors as now supplying reputation add-on tools.
We openly confess that we ourselves have been aggregating and maintaining a reputation data network of several million receiving systems for years.
So why all the sudden fuss?
Perhaps all this energy was directed at the moment last week when Microsoft announced that they will begin throttling the connections of new senders not by whether or not they were on a whitelist but solely by the established reputation of that sender. A reputation that is determined by creating an aggregated view of the sending volume, complaints, etc. over time.
So are you interested in maintaining the relationships you enjoy today with your customer? All the former rules apply with regard to message content and construction. But, whereas you may have found blacklists, whitelists, and other reputation information an inconvenient annoyance in the past, the future is going to be very different. Your customer relationships are going to start with that reputation, or your customer relationships won't be relationships at all.
