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[Guest Post from Jan Rivers, Competitive Intelligence Liaison]


This afternoon, I was sitting here, working away and listening to Erroll Garner, when an email alert blipped up in the corner of my computer screen. It was from a Bloomberg rep.

Hmmmm…..

Now, my firm doesn’t subscribe to Bloomberg, but we’ve looked at it off and on and we keep up-to-date with its latest developments. The rep’s name was one I didn’t recognize, but that’s not surprising given the frequency with which they seem to change (at least for our area).

I was being invited to an all-day Knowledge Forum being held in my city next month. “Cool!”, I thought. “Sounds interesting. Maybe it’s a way they’re promoting the changes they’ve just made to the Bloomberg Legal platform.” Strangely, the email didn’t say much about the Forum, though, but contained a link to the full invitation.

OK, so that was sort of irritating. Why make people go through additional steps to read something that could have/ should have been presented in the body of the email itself?

I was surprised when I clicked on the invitation link, to find that the resulting web page also had minimal information. It also, disconcertingly, referred to “financial professionals.” Multiple times. Oh, dear…..

Here, my jadedness started kicking in, along with a growing sense of déja vu. Bad habit, I know, and I’m trying to be better about that, but let’s just say that it’s hard to conquer.  I clicked on the link to the full agenda. Again, why not have the agenda as part of the invitation page instead of as a separate .pdf?

My jadedness was rewarded. The agenda was filled with topics like mortgage analytics, managing interest rates, fixed income electronic trading, etc

Sigh…..

One of the mantras of marketing is “target your communication.” Indeed…..Sorry, Bloomberg, but I’m not a “financial professional.” I’m a law librarian.

In the scheme of things, this faux pas is minor, but when a person receives hundreds of emails, she’d really like to receive ones from vendors which are actually relevant to what she does.

Suffice it to say, I will not be attending this one-day Knowledge Forum, but I would like to throw the idea out there for them to do similar ones for law librarians. Why not? As Bloomberg becomes a major player in the legal market, I would expect them to host law librarian forums and other similar events like their Big Two rivals do.  So, how about it, Bloomberg?  Will your next email invitation be targeted to me?