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Bluecasting or Bluespamming?

By Luis Salazar
October 29, 2007

 Bluetooth, the moniker of the popular wireless technology, is named after a 'Viking' king famous for having united several Scandinavian countries, at least temporarily. Bluetooth, however, was not a Viking in the popular sense ' he used cunning more often than violence to achieve his objectives.

It is perhaps appropriate, then, and certainly no surprise that marketers ' e-commerce firms and their marketing reps and agents among them ' have begun using Bluetooth technologies to do some 'Viking' of their own. Bluetooth Marketing ' also called Bluespamming ' uses Bluetooth technology to reach nearby potential consumers and offer them coupons, downloads, and other product or service information. Some business benefits of using Bluetooth are obvious. It is:

  • Cheap;
  • Site-specific; and
  • Potentially highly entertaining.

But at the same time, consumers might view such marketing as intrusive and an invasion of privacy ' Bluespamming, in effect. After all, a person receiving an unsolicited message on his or her cell phone, for instance ' a gadget, but one with which many users have an intimate reliance and link ' can be an annoyance, or seem like a violation of personal space.

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