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The Online Circle apologises, makes good. Bravo!

Last night I gave one hell of a serve to The Online Circle, a “full-service interactive agency” who I accused of… well… read it for yourself. Today their CEO Jeff Richardson emailed an apology, and I reckon he’s more than made good. Bravo.

I’ve always said that the true measure of a business is how it responds when something goes wrong. Too many try to cover the cracks with bullshit — I’m sure you know the kind of hollow corporate PR-speak I mean. It takes integrity and, indeed, guts to respond directly to criticism, particularly when it was a direct and as harsh as mine.

Mr Richardson, Sir, it takes a solid effort to write an email like yours, which I thoroughly appreciate, and of course I accept the apology.

Here’s the full text of Jeff’s email:

Continue reading “The Online Circle apologises, makes good. Bravo!”

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Oi, The Online Circle! Don’t spam! Don’t lie!

[Update 8 June 2010: The Online Circle’s CEO Jeff Richardson emailed an apology and explanation today. I think it’s a superb response, dignified yet accepting the very harsh criticism I served out. I’m impressed. And of course I accept the apology. So do bear that in mind as you read this rant. — Stilgherrian]

Speaking personally, I wouldn’t trust a “full-service interactive agency” that can’t even get the basics of the Spam Act 2003 right. So here’s my Big Fat Monday Night Hello to The Online Circle, the arsehats who just spammed me.

Guys, here’s how your email starts:

Hi Stilgherrian,

Firstly, thank you very much for your effort and involvement in our [redacted] campaign (We hope you enjoyed the chocolate). We saw some great blog articles and Twitter updates written that have really helped people understand more about [redacted] and why we all should get involved.

Erm, I wasn’t involved in this campaign, with or without any effort. So there’s arsehattery #1. And I never got any chocolate. There’s arsehattery #2.

Oh, and that sentence in parentheses? The full stop should be inside the closing parenthesis. That’s #3.

I’ll skip over the plug for your “we’re excited to announce” thing because — and OMFG how original is this? — you’re inviting people to upload videos to promote your client’s product! A video competition! How unique is that?

“Not at all,” is my answer there. Video competitions have to be the most overworked cliché in social media marketing.

But here are the bits which really shit me.

You are receiving this email because The Online Circle has found you to be an online influencer in Australia. This is our first contact with you and we promise not to share your name or any details with anyone.

An “online influencer”, eh? So it’s not that I’m an “interesting writer” or “respected commentator” or “glutton for chocolate” or even just “nice guy” or perhaps even “dangerous psychotic” — but an “online influencer”. Great. I fit some smegging buzzword du jour category for your marketing effort. T’riffic. How depersonalising.

“This is our first contact with you,” you say?

Bullshit.

You previously emailed me on 24 February, subject line “Social Media Influencer — How about free samples?”, to say that you “understand generating content for your blogs and social media channels can sometimes be challenging”. No, I don’t “generate content”. I write. I take photos sometimes.

And you emailed me again on 1 March, subject line “We are ready to send you some free chocolate”, with the same content.

All three emails claim “This is our first contact with you”. Liars.

And if you’d bothered to even look at my website…

… as opposed to, I presume, just finding me on some list of Australian bloggers somewhere, you might even have discovered that I don’t fill my website with random plugs for multinational corporations. Especially corporations that pull more than USD 7 billion a year in revenue but still want the punters to do their creative work for them in exchange for a few chocolates.

Arsehats. Exploitative spammy bloody arsehats.

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Crikey: Microsoft, Startpage, Facebook and Israel

Crikey logo

Despite having an appalling cold for the last ten days, I managed to knock off four articles for Crikey this week. I haven’t been linking to them in individual posts here — should I? — but here they are now.

If any of the stories are currently behind Crikey‘s paywall, you can either sign up for a free 3-week trial or wait until they emerge from the paywall two weeks after their original publication date.

Now as I say, I haven’t been creating a post here for every Crikey article of every Patch Monday podcast. I figure that if you’re interested you’ll subscribe directly to those RSS feeds, and in any event I always mention them in my Twitter stream. But what you you prefer? A brief mention here and a link to the piece, as individual posts? An end-of-week summary like this? Some sort of “Stilgherrian master feed” that combines everything from here, my new Posterous stream and my Flickr photos? What say you?

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Why I’ve deleted my Facebook account

I just deleted my Facebook account. I do not wish to do business with these people.

Facebook simply doesn’t understand that their way of doing business is unacceptable. Given the repeated public statements by their founder Mark Zuckerberg, who’s on some personal mission to make the world “more open” — whatever the hell that means — that’s unlikely to change. Fuck him.

Continue reading “Why I’ve deleted my Facebook account”
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Sydney dust storm, 23 September 2009

Sure, the Sydney dust storm was ages ago. But I’m setting up a Posterous account and playing with its ability to post automatically to Flickr, Twitter and my WordPress website.

This photo was taken on Enmore Road, Enmore at about 7.30am on 23 September 2009. It’s a frame grab from my HD video camera.

I hate doing live experiments like this, because I care about how material is presented on my website. Perhaps that’s old-fashioned, but I don’t like things turning ugly. Presentation counts. OK, you’ve seen my dress sense? Sorry.

Posted via email from Stilgherrian’s Stream

[Update: I’ll leave the formatting of this post as-is. If you look at the code, you’ll see that Posterous has its own somewhat shitty ideas about HTML. It also scaled the photo to Posterous’ 500-pixel width rather than my layout’s 600-pixel width. Bother. I have, however, changed the category from “Uncategorised” (ugh!) to stuff that fits my taxonomy. I’ve also added tags. The tags I’d added for Posterous didn’t make it through to WordPress.]