Group grope -- trying to get business benefit from Yahoo Groups

Copyright © 2002 Richard Seltzer All rights reserved. To correspond with the author, send email to seltzer@samizdat.com Comments welcome.

My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping you to become a player in this new business environment.

Managing a large email distribution list in today's spam-polluted environment can be both time-consuming and frustrating.

On the one-hand, people change email addresses at a rapid rate, moving from one free service to another, trying to cut down on the number of unsolicited commerical messages and virus messages they receive. That means that your list "ages" fast, and you continually have to go through the rejected messages that bounce back to you and distinguishing between the ones that are "transient" errors and those that are "fatal" and that you should delete from your list; and you also have to spend time adding new subscribers, and changing email addresses of old subscribers who let you know that they moved.

And no matter how useful your messages, no matter how well you do your list maintenance, and how careful you are to only add people who explicitly request inclusion, every time you send out a mailing you'll get at least a few nasty notes from people who don't remember having subscribed and want to get off the list.

So you are tempted to turn to a paid service to help you deal with your email distribution problems. And then it finally dawns on you that Yahoo Groups would do that for you for free.

Go to http://groups.yahoo.com and sign up to create a new group.

You can create a Yahoo group such that anyone can sign up to receive your messages and only you can distribute over the list. Then the subscribers do their own additions and deletions and changes. And when emails bounce back, the ones with fatal errors get automatically deleted.

Once you've set up your group, you have a variety of  ways you could manage it to take advantage of this
capability:

1) Use this simply as a supplement to your existing list. People searching at Yahoo Groups may find your postings and may choose to subscribe through Yahoo. I wouldn't expect to hook lots of people this way, but it's free and easy to use, and you have nothing to lose.

2) You could send out invitations to part of your current email subscriber list, telling them that if they prefer, they can now get the newsletter by way of Yahoo, which gives them two benefits: they can quickly and easily change or remove their address,  and they will be able to view past issues on the Web in the Yahoo Groups area.

3) You could directly subscribe the folks in your present email list by way of your Yahoo Group. In other words, instead of asking them what they would like, you simply move them over to the Yahoo service. This doesn't happen automatically, because the Yahoo folks need to take a look at your list first, to make sure that you aren't just using them to send out spam.
But in about a week, when you clear their review, you would only need to send each new issue of your newsletter to a single email address (e.g., financialengineeringtimes@yahoo.com) and it will be distributed by Yahoo to everyone on your list.

I have set up a few of Yahoo Groups to get a concrete feel for how that works and what's possible. I'm very impressed with the functionality, and very disappointed in the practical results.

They have good management tools. And you can extract a complete list of email addresses any time you want, for instance to sell/rent the list to a complementary business, whose messages your subscibers would welcome (and not consider spam).

Unfortunately, the messages you send for your business, get delivered with ads tacked on at the end. Those ads may or may not be compatible with your messages. In any case, you get no money for them -- Yahoo does.

Also, if you choose to send out a Yahoo Groups invitation instead of just moving everyone over without asking them, you will be very lucky is as many as 5% of the recipients go to the trouble of signing up. And if you move them without asking, many people will be confused and remove themselves.

In addition, the Yahoo process for letting people subscribe gives you no way to capture demographic or qualification information about your subscribers. All subscribers need to enter is their email address.

On the plus side, Yahoo Groups is a very flexible tool, giving you an opportunity to test a variety of business models. Yes, you can set up so you are the only person who can send messages, as is typical for email newsletters. I do that for notices related to my weekly chat program, Business on the Web, which I've run since 1996.  The chats themselves take place at
www.samizdat.com/chat-intro.html and edited transcripts and schedule are available at www.samizdat.com/chat.html The format is a group of peers discussing subjects of common interest, sharing with and learning from one another. I send out email notices once or twice a week. If Yahoo was the only way I sent these messages, I could save a lot of time and hassle. But I gave people a choice of signing up for Yahoo Groups, and very few people did. So I continue to use my personally maintained list, in addition. (URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/businessonthewebchats   Subscribe:  businessonthewebchats@yahoogroups.com) So, for this activity, the business benefit of Yahoo to me is minimal.

I also publish plain text books (unencrypted) on CD ROM, and wanted to provide a simple way for customers and other interested people to share their insights into how to get the most out of this new way of reading and studying. You can see our offerings at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat and can see our initial suggestions for creative uses at  http://www.samizdat.com/guide.html For this activity, I set up a Yahoo Group that I manage "moderated" style,                 filtering messages before they go out to the whole group, to control the volume of the messages and to make sure that they are on-topic. (URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/plaintextbooksoncd   Subscribe:  businessonthewebchats@yahoogroups.com) In this case, I didn't have a pre-existing list. I just include a mention of the Yahoo Group in normal correspondence and on related Web pages. So far few people have signed up and fewer still have posted useful messages. But I'm optimistic that over time this could become an important part of the business.

In addition, since early in 1994, I have published a free electronic newsletter, Internet-on-a-Disk. Each issue includes                articles related to business on the Internet, as well as brief notes and pointers to interesting new Web sites and related technolgy, as well as sources of public domain booksOriginally, I distributed it by email, maintaining the list by hand. When the email distribution became a logistical nightmare, with list maintenance taking up far too much of my time, I dropped it, and simply posted issues at my Web site instead (http://www.samizdat.com/ioad.html). Now I've set up a Yahoo Group so that once again people can sign up to receive the newsletter by email. (URL: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ioad   Subscribe:  ioad@yahoogroups.com) I was tempted to have this one available for totally open discussion, so subscribers could also share their insights with other subscribers on the topics covered. But I soon realized that spammers and virus distributors have ways of culling addresses of people who post at Yahoo and disguising their messages so they look like they are being sent by those individuals. In self-defense, I had no choice but to make this discussion group moderated, as well, so I could filter out that nonsense before it annoyed or hurt the subscribers. So far the response has been disappointing. But, over time, maybe this too might prove useful. Meanwhile, there's no cost and maintenance takes minimal effort.

All in all, if you regularly send email over a large list that you now maintain yourself, and if you don't maintain any statistics about the demographics of your list, Yahoo Groups might be a good alternative for you -- saving time and hassle. And if you want, you can use the Yahoo service to add moderated email discussion, letting readers submit reactions and comments for you to review before they get posted and forwarded to the list. This could be a good way for you to generate Letter-to-the-Editor style copy, as well as to build loyalty among your most active fans. But don't expect miracles. It could take months or even years before you build a large enough audience and find ways to motivate them to generate interesting and useful discussions.  The service is free, but it's not easy to get business benefit from it.

My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping you to become a player in this new business environment.

Web Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs, and professionals by Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002). No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve online business success. Reviews.

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