Thursday, July 08, 2010

Targeted Marketing and Mountain Biking

If you haven't figured it out already I also run CT NEMBA's blog and I find it always interesting to see the type of targeted marketing emails I get from time to time. Yesterday, I received one for the 2010 UCI Mountain Bike & Trial World Championships at Mt St. Anne in Quebec and this email from Youths For Understanding Northeast.

What is totally ironic about this piece of UCE is that I participated as a YFU exchange student right after high school, lived in Germany (and still speak the language), and I mountain bike. Now, there is no way they would have known that of me because YFU is thinking that there might be someone out there that mountain bikes that wouldn't mind hosting a student for a year, who happens to mountain bike as well.  See the connection?  YFU probably came across CT NEMBA's blog by doing Google searches for New England and Mountain Biking, and then harvested email addresses.  I wonder if they did this manually or paid someone to do it?  


Phillipp would be the perfect addition to the family and might be an easier sell to the misses than the Swedish, blonde Au Pair I have been asking for the past couple of years. Probably not going to work out, I have three kids already and a fourth might upset the family apple cart.  Any how, while I am all for supporting the sport and I am sure it would improve this potential exchange student's experience here in the US, I don't see why I or we (CT NEMBA) should help out YFU when YFU didn't contact CT NEMBA directly asking for help.  For all I know it could be just another phishing scam.

1 comment:

Greg Heil said...

Very interesting.... you're right, hard to know sometimes whats legit and whats just a scam.