When I connect to someone on a social network such as LinkedIn or Facebook, I expect to be connected to them personally, not to their company’s marketing machine. Yes, I know, it’s common to farm our online contact lists for potential customers, but I found this recent email to be a bit over the top:
As a Linked In connection to Dion Hinchcliffe, you are probably aware of Dion’s internationally acknowledged thought leadership on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA) , and Web Services. Given the growing demand for his subject matter expertise, Dion felt it important that Hinchcliffe & Company’s expand its capabilities to include world class consulting on these subjects. To that end, Dion has assembled a team of highly skilled technical architects, personally educating them on his own strategic and operational methods for successful delivery of SOA/WOA and Web Services Solutions.
On behalf of Dion, I am writing to announce the formal launch of Hinchcliffe & Company’s SOA/WOA and Web Services Practice. I will be following up with you by phone . . . but in the meantime, if you have an immediate need for this type of expertise, feel free to contact me directly. We have talented, fully trained people ready to go.
I have never heard of the person who wrote this letter (although apparently she works for Dion), and although when I connected to Dion I assumed that I would likely be put on some of his mailing lists, but I never expected one of his people to explicitly admit that she breached the privacy of one of his social networks in order to feed the marketing machine.
That is pretty lame. I stopped connecting with anybody I do not know personally and started to delete connections I agreed to before. It appears that a spirit of a networking is hijacked.