Archives for July 21, 2007

I guess I am dumb. Or just getting old, not understanding the new ways of Marketing.

My recent post: Can Tiny Zoho Beat Microsoft and Google in Online Office Apps? The Real Sanity Check attracted a strange comment, that was long, canned, promotional, barely related to the subject, essentially spam. Instead of deleting it, I educated the (fake) commenter, and hopefully others on why it was spam. This sparked a discussion in the Enterprise Irregulars group, and triggered Jerry Bowles to post on the FastForward Blog and his Enterprise 2.0: PR and Social Media: Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?

The side effect of the spam affair was that it attracted far more readers to my post than it would have received otherwise – so I guess .. thank you, spammer.. I don’t think it did a lot of good to the supposed beneficiary/sponsor company though: I had SAP customers tell me they would not work with this Tryarc, the services firm behind the spam. Side note: I used to run businesses like this, and would never have resorted to marketing us this way. But times change … what do I know?

This morning I received an email from an Enterprise Software startup CEO – it was a long joke without any comment. A fairly dumb joke for that matter, but that’s beyond the point: why did he send it in the first place, with a link to his product site? Even worse, it looked like a mass email sent out to his contact list. Hm… the timestamp was 3am, poor guy probably got drunk and lost his better judgement….

Then I found out it was actually a quite old joke (yes, I am always the last one to hear them), it’s repeated on hundreds of blogs (is it a coincidence that they all have zero or 1 inbound links, and some only this one post?), and there’s even a cartoon version.

Now, on a site aptly named “Twisted Humor”, this is perfectly OK – but when an Enterprise Software CEO inserts a line to his product site and re-sends it to potentially hundreds of business contacts .. well, that’s an entirely different matter. And it wasn’t a spontaneous drunken act, either. It was a well-prepared campaign: a contact record was set up, as well as an anonymous blog pointing to it several days before the email… so I guess someone in that company thinks this is a good marketing strategy. Again, who am I to criticize, I don’t know Jack Sch**t about Marketing.

Tags: marketing, email campaign, email etiquette, humor, spam, jack schitt