Jigsaw CEO Defends His Company

Magilla: It’s legal for me to … I don’t know … spit on my cat. But just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s wise.

Also, I have no beef with one-to-one e-mails, but you’ve got guys on your site … I saw one who had uploaded 23,000 names. Now you can’t tell me he’s got 23,000 contacts. He’s scraping that stuff.

Now you said you’ve got a definition for “non-opt-in.” Let’s talk about that for a minute.

Fowler: OK, now I’m going to leave the law because every company has to comply with the law. Now you’re adamant that it is bad business practices to send bulk, unsolicited commercial e-mail. There are lots of people who agree with that.

Now let’s look at what we really tout about Jigsaw from a marketing perspective. One of the reasons I think we’ve been so successful is every one of our records is complete. It has name, title, and the three most-important fields to any salesperson, phone number, e-mail address and postal address.

The one point that I’ll make is we don’t have these issues on phone or direct mail. It’s become part of our consciousness as business people that we’re going to get cold called and we’re going to get direct mail. For whatever reason, the public has a tendency to react to very strongly to the e-mail side of it.

My personal prediction is that the furor over e-mail marketing as a direct channel to get to someone is going to tone down over time. My personal belief is that if someone’s going to bother me, the one I don’t want is a phone call. If some gets me on the phone, that’s the one that takes the most of my time. As for direct mail, I’m a green guy. I live in Northern California. I cannot not recycle. It takes me more time to recycle direct mail and [what is more] a tree just died.

With phone and direct mail, there is no opt-in comcept.

Magilla: And there’s a reason for that. With phone and direct mail there are natural economic governors in place. It costs a lot of money to put together and send a direct mail piece. It costs a lot of money to hire a telerep and have them bang on those phone numbers. E-mail, on the other hand, costs nothing to send. This is an argument that’s been made for more than 10 years. When you send e-mail you’re transferring costs to others. Someone has to process that mail. In e-mail we don’t have the economic governors that force us to be responsible, or somewhat responsible, that we have in these other channels.

Fowler: I disagree that there’s not a governor. There is a governor in that you’re losing the ability to market to someone, and for any legitimate business that’s a huge cost. And the technology [to fight spam I presume; I unfortunately, cut him off] just keeps getting better and better.

Magilla: But that’s my whole point. Unless you’ve got some magic formula I don’t know about, if I pull 50,000 names off of Jigsaw, and e-mail them, I am risking not being able to talk to many people who even want to hear from me because I’m going to get marked as a spammer. Is that not a risk?

Fowler: I think that it is absolutely a risk and that’s why in e-mail best practices we’re very clear when you read it that people should be cautious. Jigsaw’s really about open source. Our company data is downloadable for free. We do privacy practices that the rest of the data industry doesn’t even dream about. First of all if you want to find out if you’re on Jigsaw, you can do it in two seconds. Try and do that on any other data company. We let people get removed automatically and electronically now. And we let them provide references and instructions on how they want to be contacted. We really try to say look: “Openness and transparency are key.”

What do we do when we have a customer who takes 50,000 names and uses that information to contact people one by one? And then we’ve got another customer and even though we’ve told them, “Go to our e-mail learning center and learn how to do this right,” and they don’t.

Magilla: But by taking names from the Jigsaw database and e-mailing them, isn’t that by definition not an industry best practice?

Fowler: So you’re saying I’m a sales guy and I get one name off of Jigsaw…

Magilla: I’ve got no problem with that. If you’re a sales guy and take one name… I’ve got no problem with one-to-one sales pitches.

Fowler: But that’s what I’m getting at. And that’s what the e-mail learning center is all about. It’s saying: “Guys, if you’re going to do this, you’ve got to do it right.”

Magilla: OK, we can get into: “So we take one [e-mail address]” And, yeah, I’m comfortable with that. Then we take two. I’ve found the e-mail addresses of two potential buyers of my widgets, and I’m cool with that, too. Well, when does it become bulk? I don’t know. Maybe it’s 100 and then it becomes bulk. But people aren’t going into the Jigsaw database and pulling one name, are they?

Fowler: Sure they are. They do it all the time, especially in this economy. Job seekers come in and pull one name and send their resume to the person who does the actual hiring rather than sending their resume to jobs@xyz.com. Sales guys do it all day long.

Magilla: What percentage of people who pull data from Jigsaw do so on a one-to-one basis?

Fowler: We have just shy of a million members right now.

Magilla: Well, I’m a member and I never signed up.

Fowler: No, no, no. That’s one of the things that’s a little confusing about our business model. A registered member is someone who joins the service and has the ability to add, update and graveyard records. If you want a business-card record from Jigsaw, the way you get a credit to do that is you add, update or graveyard a record. We have now 15.5 million contact records on Jigsaw. You’re one of those.

We have a million members and the huge majority of those are people who will come in and dabble in onesies and twosies. There is no doubt there are members out there doing very, very large amounts of data. You can look at our leader boards and see it.

Event marketers are very active. And recruiters are some of our most active members.

And if I can digress for just a moment, I believe the social impact of this is that if it makes information transparent … it makes business-card information very easy to get to find people compared to the old days. Recruiters use Jigsaw when they’re looking for passive candidates, folks that are employed but who aren’t necessarily looking for a job. Instead of people getting one job offer in a given period of time, they’re getting 10 because people are finding their resume on LinkedIn and finding their contact information on Jigsaw.

What this does is transfer power from the employer to the employee. Perfect information makes perfect markets. There is good and there is bad when information becomes more transparent. We’re not saying there is nothing bad when information becomes more transparent. There are people out there who are going to do stupid things. And I think that’s just where the market goes, People do stupid things with cold calling; they do stupid things with direct mail. It’s not like e-mail’s any different. It’s just a younger sport. There are going to be good marketers and there are going to be bad marketers. We try and promote the good.

Magilla: The fundamental issue here is that the Jigsaw model invites and encourages marketers to take risks that I would guess a lot of my readers would say marketers should not take. I guess that’s the best way I can put it.

Fowler: Let’s start where we agree. We both agree that if you go and send to 50,000 records then you’re an idiot and you’re going to get blocked. We also agree that if you’re a sale guy and you send one e-mail out to one person, then that’s cool. But there is a middle ground where there are a few dozen. And sales and marketing must happen.