Making companies pay for our time and attention

I’m in Los Angeles, and last night had dinner with fellow Engagement Alliance advisory board member Hillary Johnson and our friend Amy Alkon, a syndicated advice columnist whose work is carried in more than one hundred newspapers across the US. (If you think her column is a great chance to be influential, you should see what she can do with her blog.) In Amy’s spare time, she fights the good fight:

If I have a hobby, it’s being a part-time detective. I’ve tracked down one stolen car and the dirtbag who stole it, then tracked him down again and made him pay me his court-ordered restitution. Then there was my hit-and-run driver, whom I also tracked down, and had prosecuted. I also tracked down a friend’s birth parents, figured out who was e-harrassing another friend of mine and made the person stop. (The friend wanted to send a person an email demanding they stop. Naw. I instead looked up their corporate email policy—all the small print every big company puts out about not using corporate email for nefarious ends—and we sent the harrasser a screen shot of it. That was the last my friend heard from the harrasser, of course.

Amy might best be described as a customer justice advocate; that, however, might be missing the point. The truth is that with the tools now available online, anyone can take back control of their time and attention like Amy has. It’s not that difficult. Just ask the companies that Amy has forced to compensate her for the time they’ve stolen from her with their intrusive, annoying, and disruptive marketing tactics. As she says:

The point isn’t really to make money off people (although I’m going after a telemarketer next, and because of the guy’s arrogance, plan to sue him in small claims court for my posted prices), it’s to show people that they just can’t just walk all over people with impunity and play out their lives as if they’re the lone member of the ME! ME! ME! generation...I’m all for freedom of speech...such as the freedom to hire somebody to stand on public property to ask us to give them our phone numbers so people in a boiler room can irritate the crap out of us. The freedom I’m not for is the freedom to hijack a telephone line I pay for to interrupt me at dinner time (or any other time) to try to sell me something.

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