Online Media Cultist

Dear Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster:

When an old friend of mine went to work for you (business networking site Jobster) last year (he since left), I decided to check it out for myself and sign up for a profile. It’s a site that tries to make business networking friendlier than competitor LinkedIn while helping you to network your way to a next professional gig.

As will happen with these kinds of things, I stopped visiting Jobster as it wasn’t relevant to my day-to-day online life and after a while it dropped off my radar. Cut to a month or two ago, when I received an e-mail notification that I had received a message through my Jobster profile. Somewhat surprised and mildly curious, I went to check it out.

The beginning of the message reads:

Hi there. As founder and CEO of Jobster, i wanted to be the first to thank you for joining our network.

I also wanted to pass along a big tip for getting the most out of Jobster.

The secret to Jobster is relationships. The more contacts you have on Jobster, the more opportunities you have to find your next job or your next person to hire.

Did you know that by clicking on “EXPAND YOUR JOBSTER NETWORK” you can invite your contacts from Gmail, Yahoo! and LinkedIn to join your Jobster network? Everytime you add a new contact, that opens up more and more opportunities for you on Jobster.

Okay, thought I. The CEO of Jobster sent a note to everyone’s profile in an effort to let all currently registered site members know that the site still exists. So, cool. Jobster’s still around. Hurray for them.

However, this process is turning into a twice monthly ritual. I’ve now received my fourth marketing-e-mail message from old Jason Goldberg.

The most recent, sent out this morning, begins with:

Hey there -

It’s me again with some more tips and tricks on how to get the most out of Jobster.

Have you checked out your new Jobster home page? (duh! It’s the page you are on right now!) Your new Jobster homepage includes:

-A new section called, “My Featured Jobs.” These are jobs we selected for you based on your profile and interests. Check them out!

-To the right, you should find, “My Statistics.” See who has recently viewed your profile.

-Have you signed up for job alerts? If not, what are you waiting for? Job alerts put matching jobs into your email in-box.

By now, it’s painfully obvious that I haven’t received a personal message. Therefore, more likely than not, a kid that I went to junior high school with didn’t go on to found a huge multinational diamond distribution syndicate and consequently a job offer that entails a multimillion dollar signing bonus, Bentley, butler, and personal trainer is not on the immediate radar.

So, in conclusion, I really do wish you, Jason, and Jobster the best. But I already have a great job and I didn’t opt in for e-mail marketing messages.

So, please, enough with the hot tips, okay?

Signed,
Curmudgeonly Media Cultist

Update: To be fair, you can turn off external e-mail notification within account settings, but this requires action that most lazy people like me don’t want to bother to take!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 24th, 2007 at 10:24 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: jobster, social networking