Where did they find twenty-five thousand people who consented to participate in their market research? I'm having trouble convincing myself they aren't spammers.
If you were talking to a non-technical marketing person, and he asked you "Hey, can you tell us how many of our customers we haven't talked to in 3 months", and you said "4,386 out of 12,381" seven minutes later, and he accused you of lying to him because it is inconceivable that you could have counted to 4,386 in seven minutes, how would you feel?
You and I both know that computers count very quickly indeed, that SQL joins are possible, and that seven minutes was probably 6:30 of looking up an API call or DB structure, 30 seconds of typing, and 100 miliseconds of waiting for the query to execute.
Here's something that you may not be intimately aware of: people who are competent with Internet-style marketing can use "computers count to big numbers really quickly" with permission-based marketing approaches, like e.g. setting in motion an SEO strategy which passively attracts almost arbitrarily high numbers of visitors. Bingo Card Creator -- pretty freaking niche -- has hundreds of thousands of people sign up every year, and involves no spamming.
Yeah, that was more confrontational than I wanted to be, sorry guys. If thousands in the niche exist and are reachable in a permission-based way, kudos. That's still kind of mind-blowing. I guess I was primed to expect bad behavior after seeing a reference to cold-calling.
Not even that - the article only claims "25,000 messages". Multiple messages in the same conversation, as well as multiple conversations with the same person. The number of _people_ may have only been in the high hundreds…
The percentage isn't that great, but we usually aren't the ones initiating conversation. The quality is definitely what drives us to continue using it.
Olark has a free trial. When we first put it on our site we were pretty hesitant too, but after the trial we were sold.
