There’s a ton of tweets cirlcing through the twittersphere talking about a new multi-level marketing opp promoted by none other than The Donald himself. Now I have no idea if The Donald is actually associated with any of these ‘offers’, but I do know I foolishly clicked on one of the links to check it out.
Instead of earning me millions as advertised, Firefox locked up as it tried to digest the hacked code, then finally just choked and died all together. Even when I restarted, Firefox tried to open my previous session history, choked and died again.
It was at about that time I was telling The Donald ‘You’re fired!’
Back when I co-founded RadicalMail in 1998, we had similar issues. The concept was simple: we developed a technology that allowed our clients to send multimedia emails to their customers. So Fox, for example, could send you a movie trailer that played right in your inbox - and you could order tickets without ever having to pop a browser. The issue? There were so many different email clients and connection speed issues, that more often than not we’d explode the very inbox we were sending our messages to. Talk about annoying SPAM (Sh!t Passing As Mail). We were the kings.
So we went back to the drawing board, and after considerable investment in infrastructure and Quality Assurance, we got it right. But not without re-learning a valuable lesson: just don’t blast your marketing message out there before thinking it through. If you love your (potential) customer passionately, there really is no middle ground. And no other alternative.
So though I still respect The Donald - even his hair - I gotta wonder how he got involved in these shenanigans. Looks like he’s in need of a mentor on this one.
What’s your latest marketing gripe?
