Inside dumb marketing tricks
September 17 2003
Similar blog entries from Andrew
Pollack and Chris
Miller IDoNotes, talking about
a (insert adjective here) marketing approach taken by a Lotus ISV who makes
anti-spam software. This firm's president has been sort of publishing
a site that claims to be about Notes/Domino news, and drew
my ire once before with a poor-taste
April Fool's Day joke. This latest stunt really takes the cake. The
"editor" of the news site just so happens to be the president
of the Lotus ISV, so maybe it shouldn't surprise anyone that the news site
recently awarded an "Editor's Choice" to the ISV's anti-spam
software.
Having been a judge over the years for legitimate Notes/Domino awards such
as the Lotus Beacon Awards (now
Lotus Awards) and e-Pro Magazine's
Apex
Awards, I'm somewhat offended
at this shameless marketing tactic. There are a lot of good, hard-working
IBM business partners that deserve as many legitimate opportunities as
possible to showcase their work. It only takes one bad apple to spoil
the bunch; I am hopeful that the industry and Lotus customers will dismiss
this vain attempt at vanity, and not let it impact their opinions of the
other awards.
Post a Comment
- 2
Mike Werner http://www.motorbiker.org | 9/17/2003 9:41:31 AM
Funny, just before reading you blog, I got a SPAM mail for this idiots. How funny !! A spam to stop spams.
- 3
Wolfgang Flamme http://www.sns1.de/partner/flamme/wflamme.nsf/ | 9/17/2003 10:40:59 AM
Ed,
this is the whole truth about foul apples:
Sort them out ASAP.
- 4
Nathan T. Freeman | 9/17/2003 12:15:31 PM
...and called him out for harvesting addresses from websites. He claims not to have done so. Then he claimed to be removing my address as we spoke.
Today, I got another email from them.
You can call Mr. Paolino at (949)494-2696 and express your opinions about his behavior. I encourage you to do so.
You can find his BS privacy statement here...
http://www.dominofiles.com/df.nsf/bykey/FPAO5FXVFY
- 5
Ben Poole http://www.benpoole.com | 9/17/2003 1:54:41 PM
They claim not to harvest email addresses, yet reams of people in the Domino community have been spammed by them without giving our addresses to them or any of their affiliates. Scum. God, I hope they're didn't get our addresses from Cassetica when their site got hacked...
- 6
Colin Williams http://www.guttedgeek.com | 9/17/2003 3:23:34 PM
..I'm very careful about who I give my WORK email address to and yet this company managed to have somehow aquired it and send their spam to me. Based on this I'm not even sure they are havesting email addresses - more like getting them from a New Zealand source who maybe acts as the local reseller?
- 7
Jim G | 9/17/2003 5:13:26 PM
If you are talking about what I think you are talking about then don't knock the product - its actually very good. Have just completed an extensive evaluation. The marketing approach may be flawed / questionable but thats a different matter.
- 8
jonvon http://jonvon.net/ | 9/17/2003 5:31:10 PM
of course, your "anonymous" comment can only lead us to believe that you must be mr. paolino, or someone in his employ. assuming, of course, you are talking about what i THINK you are talking about!
- 9
Ben Poole http://www.benpoole.com | 9/17/2003 5:33:09 PM
Amazing. Yet also... pathetic.
- 10
Tom Duff http://www.twduff.com | 9/17/2003 6:13:00 PM
... but there's a good chance that Ed can see the IP address of the anonymous post. Would be interesting to see if it came from a group we "think" it came from... :-)
- 11
Jim G www.double6.co.uk | 9/17/2003 7:49:48 PM
That anonymous was me. Mr Brill can confirm because I did enter email address in the comments box. I/we have nothing to do with SpamSentinel whatsoever. We are a UK IBM Business Partner and if you check out Mike Golding's excellent notestips.com you will find a fairly recent posting on the subject of Anti-Spam solutions for Domino by me regarding this and other products. It does work and works well. I would consider re-selling in UK in specific circumstances. FYI the evaluation was run on a rather esotericly set-up R5 server server on NT4. One of Bob's senior techinical guys even re-wrote the .dll for us due to a problem experienced by the fact that the Domino server was bound to a specific IP rather than the expected localhost. My comments about the marketing aspect remain - having said that we haven't had any unsolicited email from the manufacturers whatsoever.
- 12
Jim G | 9/17/2003 7:54:49 PM
That I haven't spoken to Mr Paolino nor his his company offered free licences or anything else for that matter. We just ran an evaluation and the reasons we chose to do so are described in my Notestips.com article. In a nutshell its to do with Domino being inside an SMTP gateway - RBL lookup and other spamassasin type features ain't too clever in this situ
- 13
Jim G | 9/17/2003 8:11:29 PM
http://www.notestips.com/80256B3A007F2692/0/C300036FB551B7BA80256D8D007BA9A6
- 14
Ed Brill www.edbrill.com | 9/17/2003 9:20:04 PM
yes, he had put his e-mail addr in it in the first place.
Nathan, I like your style -- My first hope is that Mr. Napolito finds his way to this discussion to see the ill will he has created.
- 15
Ben Poole http://www.benpoole.com | 9/18/2003 3:52:18 AM
It seems a shame that this outfit appear to have a decent product, yet employ these crappy marketing tactics. If I were a potential customer, it would definitely put me off.
- 16
Ben Poole http://www.benpoole.com | 9/18/2003 11:07:41 AM
Bah.
What really takes the cake is that they then send spam to thousands of business partners touting their anti-spam product. As if it wasn't brazen enough to proclaim themselves winners of the dubious award, to then contribute to the spam problems to promote their "win" is just inexcusable.