Photo: Krishna De on Flickr

Business events are great and they can be a really great place to network and learn more about other people, find leads, make connections etc.

I have one large pet peeve, though…

Business card draws.

I love them. I mean, I’m enticed by free stuff like anyone else. I always hold out a little hope that I’ll be the grand prize winner, and so I rifle through my purse and pull out a card and drop it in your draw bin. I know it’s in there now; I put it there.

But you know what? I never intended for you to add me to your email marketing list.

Trust me when I say if I want your email newsletters I will, indeed, sign up for them. I subscribe to several – I get them from WOMMA, IIMA, BCAMA, Tourism Vancouver and other DMOs, Marketing Sherpa and several more I can’t recall off the top of my head. I also subscribe to a lot of things via RSS. In fact, I have over 500 items waiting for my eyes at this very moment… and I will get to them.

However, if you send me your email that I know I did not sign up for, I will unsubscribe. Not only will I unsubscribe, but I will very likely not do business with you in future out of principle (yes I can be moody that way).

Let me say this a different way: Do not spam me. Please. Just don’t.

It is poor form to sign someone up for your email list without their permission.

• Business card draws are not permission
• A prior phone conversation is not permission
• A prior business transaction is not permission
• A connection on LinkedIn is not permission
• A relationship on Twitter is not permission

I understand the drive to want to send your info to as many people as is humanly possible; I really do. I want to make my sales targets as much as you do. I manage a decent sized database of double-opt in subscribers all wanting different types of information and I take a lot of care to send only relevant information. Even then I still get spam reports from people who went through the double opt-in process and chose to sign up.

Now that I’ve been (I think) very clear about what not to do with my business card, here’s what I think you should do: show me you care about my business and sell me something of value.

Now that I’m thinking about it, maybe I need to redesign my business card; after all, if mine looked like this business card, I’d be less inclined to toss it in the draw bin in the first place. But then maybe I’d be less inclined to share them at all.