Social networks drive down the cost of specific communication, so the spray and pray approach is that much more intolerable. Firms continue to do it because they lack the will or imagination to change. Increasingly, I refuse to take calls from people I don’t know; 1 ot 1 communication is very expensive, so I only spend those cycles with people who demonstrate that they know me enough to care; that means being considerate and doing their homework or getting a referral.

Voice spam is way past diminishing returns. Similarly true for direct mail (killing trees for spam). I think the only reason that we don’t have a paper do not spam list (as for telecoms) in the U.S. is the federal post would literally go out of business overnight; that’s how wasteful it is.

Lastly, I work with firms to use social networks to improve the value of their “discovery” phase of busdev (I see cold calling as part of discovery, historically). The calls are very expensive for people to make, too. Better to prospect online and pre-qualify, so you can approach people who really need your service *and* know why; then it’s not spam. In case this is interesting, here’s a post I wrote on social networks’ impact on each stage of the relationship life cycle. http://bit.ly/snrship1

Cheers-