The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

You think your job sucks. I swear, I keep looking for an Onion byline on this story. The more I read, the more whiskey-tango-foxtrot it gets:

PROVO, Utah — No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a Provo office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss.

There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the “team-building exercise,” that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth.

And it’s widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: “You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales.”

Yes, you read that right. In an attempt to spur the sales team into making more sales, this company waterboarded one of their own guys as a motivational exercise!

What makes this even more surreal (I would say funnier, but this is so far past funny and into downright disturbing that if my eyebrows go any higher, I’m going to end up with a permanent Klingon forehead crest) is that the company in question is a coaching company (warning, annoying flash intro) that makes success and leadership products.

And what makes it scarier is the sheer level of cluelessness involved. Because, see, the exercise wasn’t actually based on the waterboarding-as-torture, but was rather a misbegotten re-creation of student abuse perpetrated by Socrates. Now, I’m not even sure what part of holding someone’s head underwater as a motivational exercise made sense to the old Greek pederast himself, even allowing for differing cultural realities. But it’s unfathomable how anyone in this day and age of waterboarding scandal perma-reporting can look at Socrates’ actions and think, “Brilliant! Smithers, fetch me a bucket! It’s time for a little team building.”

Again, this would be frikkin hilarious…if it were a parody. The fact that it really happened is just…hell, I don’t even have the words for what it is. Terrifying. Sick. Twisted. Mind-boggling. Another nail in the coffin of my desire to never, ever work for anyone else, certainly, and yet another reason to avoiding any activity that smacks of team building.

What is funny, though, is reading the company’s About Us statement in light of the above “team-building” activity:

Prosper, Inc. provides executive-level coaching for individuals. Our mission is to provide our students with the education and hands-on experiences they need to achieve their personal and professional goals. We strive to make the road to personal achievement meaningful, rewarding, and enjoyable.

By understanding our business and by becoming sensitive to our world, we position ourselves to help others become leaders in an ever-changing marketplace. Our products and services are based on proven principles that, when applied, produce positive results in the lives of individuals and families.

Kinda like those games where you add “…under the bed” to the end of hymn titles. Heh, hands on experiences - in waterboarding! D’oh!

Seriously, Onion. Did you guys write this? C’mon, fess up. I won’t tell, I promise!

Tags: Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity, Business by Soni Pitts
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The Creative “FAIL Your Way to a Win” Business Model:

Sell Crippled Hardware and Shut Down Anyone Who Tries to Make It Work Right

Profit!!!

Well, I’m sure it sounded like a good idea at the time…

Don’t know how many non-geeks are aware of the flaming ball of suck that has become hardware producer Creative’s response to a user-created hack, but it’s worth paying attention to.

To make a long story short, Creative produces the popular Sound Blaster soundcard. Which is great, except that there are some functionality issues in Vista and just in general that the users aren’t thrilled with. To be blunt, the sound cards are crippleware, meaning that their functionality is intentionally dehanced (lovely neologism, that) by the company in order to…well, I have no idea why, personally, since I’m not a hardware geek. But I’m guessing it’s either to sell more of a different hardware or upgrade, or as a butt-kiss to someone like Microsoft or the RIAA, as such companies have an unsettling tendency to get hardware makers to hobble their goods so as not to give the end user Too Much Freedom To Do With Their Purchased Goods As They Wish. (Can’t have the peasants getting it all their way, now can we?)

It’s like buying a car that won’t make left turns, because the car manufacturer has a deal with a soft drink company who’s slogan is “The ‘Right Way’ to Refresh,” or they have another line selling GPS units and want you to buy them in order to generate right-turn-only paths to your destinations. I.e. your car has the capacity to make left turns, but the company has interfered with the steering so that it won’t. But it’s your car…surely once you own it, you should be able to go in and remove that “fix” or have it removed for you. Right? Wrong…

Along comes Daniel_K, a modder (geek speak for someone who creates “mods,” or modifications). Daniel_K mods custom drivers for people who have bought the crippled hardware. These drivers give you the ability to actually use your Creative soundcard to do essential soundcardy things, functionality that the soundcard is already capable of but that has been hobbled in-store. In short, he makes downloadable “left-turn-enabling” patches.

Yay!!! The customers are thrilled. Now they can buy these really nice soundcards and still get the functionality they require for whatever applications they’re doing. So they buy more soundcards. The customers get functionality, the company gets sales, everybody’s happy, right? Wrong…

Here is Creative’s response to Daniel_K, basically a cease and desist letter whose content boils down to, “Quit making our stuff work, dammit. We farked it for a reason, and now you’re stealing from us by giving our customers the right to do what they want with the stuff they bought.”

This was posted in Creative’s own support/user forums. It was the equivalent of dumping flaming gasoline on a beehive. Welcome to the world of the Internet swarm. Enraged geeks from all over the place have been breaking their soundboards and posting pics, calling for boycotts, including setting up a site named BoycottCreative.com, spreading the word through top-listed sites like Digg and Reddit and just basically rampaging around loudly in forums and other outlets ‘net-wide. The Creative forum itself is full of thread titles like, “Recommend me a NON Creative sound card”, “Creative Boycott,” “FAIL” and just plain old “Bye.” (Or, at least, these posts are there right now, and haven’t been removed as of this writing.) There’s even a rather ominous thread titled “Class Action Filing.” That can’t be good.

To sum up, Creative got greedy and stupid. They decided it was better to sell crippled hardware to geeks whose sole purpose in life is to tweak their stuff for maximum power and functionality, and then attempt to tightly control what users could do with it (and thereby make more money through some corporate sleight of hand). And when someone came along and gave their customers what they actually wanted (i.e. the ability to use their soundcards to their fullest capacity), instead of saying, “Hey, great, thanks for fixing that - now our customers will be thrilled to buy even more of our stuff,” Creative shut them down, publicly and with clear statements to the effect that their priority was making money, not providing functional sound cards.

End result? It’s a reasonable possibility that Creative will suffer enough of a financial and PR setback to deal them a critical, or even possibly fatal, blow. The original cease-and-desist only went public two days ago, and already some retailers are suspending sales of Creative products due to the high rate of returns. Geeks around the world are boycotting, breaking and busting on Creative loudly and publicly.

In just a few days, Creative went from merely a clueless company producing good quality products that required some tweaking to really work well, to pure, unadulterated, kitten-punching evil bastards who have been caught publicly monologuing their evil plans at the battle-bloodied and bound-and-gagged hero (Daniel_K) who was trying to free the princess and save the day.

As they used to say back in the day, “Smooth move, Ex-lax.”

Moral of the story: DO NOT PISS IN YOUR OWN WELL.

Don’t try to sucker your core customers by selling them junk and pretending it’s a business model. Give them what they want, not what you want to give them. Don’t try to cripple what you sell in the hopes of selling more stuff to make up for what isn’t working (or by bowing to outside commercial influences) and then get mad when someone creates a work-around to your craptastic fail. You should be hiring those people, not trying to bury them.

And if you do fail to heed this warning, you’d better hope like hell you have a really good Plan B, such as a hefty retirement fund. Because you can’t unkill the Golden Goose, and your customers will be winging those golden eggs right back at your head with a vengeance when they find out what you’ve done.

Tags: Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity, Customers, Ethics and Business, Society and Culture by Soni Pitts
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Re: my previous posts on marketers who view business as war, I recently got an email from Eeyore, the subject of which explains that he can teach me “how to DESTROY newbies in any industry.” [emphasis his]

Gee, thanks. I’ve always wanted to be a part of the Massacre of the Innocents, and now’s my chance.

Stupid newbies.

Tags: Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity by Soni Pitts
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Subtitled: If You Don’t Get That Flyer Out of My Face, I’m Going to Strangle You With Your Own Spam Thread

[This is crossposted from a response I wrote on an a Google group in reaction to a bit of spam trying to sell a video full of “Google Smashing” techniques to get you to #1 on Google overnight, or some such crap.]

Here’s my question:

There are all kinds of tricks, tips and tools for getting your website, your ebook, your telecourse or your blog into the top spot at Google. And some of them even work, no question about it.

But (and that rustling sound you hear is me dusting off and donning my coaching hat), let’s reframe this issue for just a second and ask:

Does your content actually DESERVE to be #1?

Is it, really, the most relevant information on the topic a person could find if they went searching for those keywords and phrases? Is your product, site or blog really what they’re hoping to find?

Or, by putting yourself at #1, are you simply acting like one of those annoying campaigners standing outside of the voting hall that won’t let you through their ranks to vote for who you have already decided to vote for without listening to their spiel first and, probably, taking a piece of brightly colored and expensively printed landfill with you?

Are you helping, really, or are you simply getting in the way?

Google and other search engine rankings are supposed to be an indicator of relevance, not your 133t algorithm-hacking skillzzzoorzz. If you can’t get to the number one spot, or at least on the front page, simply by being the most relevant, the most interesting and the most current information, product or service specific to that keyword or search term, then really…you *shouldn’t* be there. (Yes, I’m simplifying a lot. The principle remains the same.)

What is it about being in business that changes us, the minute we get behind our desks, from thinking, caring and empathetic members of the human community into single-minded, blindered profit-makers with bottom-line eyes and a “sell-sell-sell” one-track mind? (Of course, I’m sure that none of you guys are like that. It’s all those other people. I’m using the generalized “royal we” here. Humor me for a minute.)

We stop thinking about how we would like to be treated, and start thinking about what we can do to make the next sale, regardless of how we respond to those exact same tactics when we’re back to our normal “just folks” selves (where most likely we’d spot it for the commercial pitch it is and either ignore it at best or be annoyed with it to the point of fissile combustion at worst).

We stop acting like people who like and are trying to help other people, and start acting like hunters on the prowl, loading up with the latest and greatest take-down weaponry, deceptive camouflage and covert maneuvers we can get our grease-painted, doe-scented fingers on.

In short, we quit being people and start being businesses.

“But the whole point of being in business is to make money…isn’t it?” I hear from the peanut gallery.

Look, I’ve got no beef with anyone making any amount of money, provided they do it legitimately and ethically. Go on, get rich. Roll around naked in a pile of shiny gold coins if it makes you happy (although…ouch). I couldn’t care less.

That’s not my point.

What I’m saying is…hell, you’ve been out there. You’ve been on the net looking for something you needed. You’ve bought stuff from people. You shop.

The times, they are a changing. People these days not only don’t want to be sold (they never did want that), but they’re savvier, smarter and have more recourse to avoid you if you try to sell them stuff.

Business is beginning to be viewed (at least by the customers, which includes you some of the time) as less of a commercial activity separate from and outside the sphere of the rest of human interaction and more of a stewardship of valuable goods from there to here. We the people expect to be able to find what we’re looking for and have it delivered to us with concerned attention to our needs, without having to wade through sidewalk squatters on the way in, or a gauntlet of ads, emails, harangues and other annoyances on the way out. And if we can’t get that, we’ll change laws, we’ll change technology and we’ll change the nature of commerce itself until we can.

Be an ass, and don’t be surprised if your assholery gets blogged, Tubed, Boinged, Dugg and Redd for all the world to see. And act on.

But some people in business just don’t get it. They see anyone who’s buying anything from anyone other than them (or even just looking) as someone who has just proven they have cash in their wallet, regardless of the fact that said wallet-bearing primate has demonstrated NO INTEREST WHATSOEVER IN THEIR CONTENT, PRODUCT OR SERVICE.

Trying to buy something online during this time of transition is a lot like trying to buy something in a big, open-air market in a third-world country. You spend the entire shopping trip fending off repeated, endless offers of guides and personal shoppers, ambulatory sellers trying to interest you in their wares and people whose uncle is selling the very thing you’re looking for, if you’ll just come this way, sirrah (even when they haven’t a clue as to what you’re interested in).

And God save you if you actually buy anything, because suddenly you’re the picnic at the ant Olympics. You’re immediately swarmed by a thronging mass of these same “helpers,” plus a veritable river of beggars and pickpockets that appears to pour forth from the very walls of the market itself. If you can make it back to your hotel room with all of your limbs, possessions and coins intact, you count yourself very, very lucky.

By participating in “Google smashing” techniques, by engaging in marketing and advertising strategies that would annoy or inflame you if you had to deal with them, by spending more time tweaking your SEO than your content, and by positioning yourself in front of what someone really wants in the hopes of catching some of that traffic (or, likewise, thronging around them on the way out of the store after they’ve bought), you just become part of that crowd of beggars and commercial mercenaries. You’ve become the problem, instead of the solution.

But don’t these tactics make money? Uh, yeah, they do. Quite a bit, actually. I won’t deny it. But they do so at the expense of our humanity, by turning other people into prey and turning us into people who see other people as prey.

And that, as far as I’m concerned, is not who I ever want to be. Not for any amount of shiny gold coins.

Just something to consider, the next time you see an ad for something that promises to get you to the top of Google, or the next time you’re considering just how intensively you want to market your next product or service offering.

I’ve got no beef with good business practices. And I think people who actually have something of value are ethically and morally required to do their best to get it into the hands of those who can benefit from it. But this isn’t that. And if you can’t tell the difference between the two, or if the glare from those shiny coins tends to blind you to such subtleties, then IMHO you really have no business being in business in the first place.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity, Business, Ethics and Business, Internet Marketing, Society and Culture, Success by Soni Pitts
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It’s about trees. And Texas. I think.

(Hint: Check out the page title in your browser’s page title bar. And yes, that last sentence was written that way intentionally.)

Look folks, there’s a point at which a keyword-stuffed article ceases to be an article in any sense but a purely theoretical one and becomes merely a handy carrying case for keywords. At that point, what’s the point, really? You’re not providing any value (there’s nothing in this article I couldn’t find clearer and better info on in 5 seconds with Google), and it’s written bad enough that no one’s going to read it. So what’s the point?

This? Not as bad as some I’ve seen (and perhaps even a few that I’ve written, although in my defense they were cobbled together to the client’s spec).

But dude. That page title? That just hurts.

Tags: Advertising and Marketing, Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity, Copywriting by Soni Pitts
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Here’s a quick tip to my readers: If you’re doing what I’m about to describe…STOP IT RIGHT THIS SECOND!!!

You see, I get these emails from this guy I’ll call Eeyore, for reasons that will quickly become clear. I bought something from Eeyore a while back. It’s a service, not a product, so I keep on his subscribers list to make sure I’m aware of any changes to the service that I need to know about. In the meantime, however, that means I end up getting all of Eeyore’s marketing emails. Which is fair enough.

But here’s what is driving me nuts: Eeyore won’t stop complaining.

I don’t know where he picked up his copywriting techniques (I’d hazard to say the Bitchenmohn Institute of Pain, but that’s just a guess), but every single one of his marketing messages are written about him and how horrible his life is because of his business.

For example, I’ve received emails from him whinging on about the crap he’s taking from his business partners for daring to offer me some amazing deal. Apparently, they had no intention of offering whatever the hell it was for such a DRASTIC DISCOUNT and to top it off, his early release of the product has so undercut their business that they’re furious and threatening to come after him. But he decided to take the bullet anyway and now he’s being hounded to the edge of hell and back by them for stealing all their profits…

Oh, for crying out loud. Does he really think we’re this stupid? If his business partners really were that pissed about his undercutting, he’d be in court or (depending on his business partners) feedin’ da fishes, not on his computer trying to sell me the damned thing.

And please God, don’t even get him started on how much of a pain in the ass it is to run his business. Apparently, we’re all to believe that running this business for our benefit is an enormous act of brave charity on his part, because apparently it’s making his life hell, costing him his health and, if it keeps on going like it is, probably slowing down the earth’s rotation so that he has more hours in the night to fret about his awful life and attracting rogue asteroids to his house.

A recent email blathered on about how he was soooo sorry, but he simply couldn’t add me to his roster of private consulting clients (not that I had asked him too, mind), because he was just too damned busy. He moans about how much work maintaining the business is. He whines about how much time it’s taking up and how that eats into his private client work. But no worries, I can buy some tutorials and stuff from this other guy (I’m assuming it’s an affiliate thing) that covers some of the same territory his private coaching would. But he just hates himself for not being able to help me himself (and yes, that’s pretty much an actual quote there).

Dude, seriously. Don’t sweat it. I reaaally wasn’t interested. I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly not going to be spending any of my hard-earned money being coached by a guy who sounds like Woody Allen after 5 years in Gitmo.

He sent another email a few days later because he got a flood of responses asking if he was retiring (maybe he did, maybe that’s just a marketing ploy, but I wouldn’t doubt it considering how depressed he sounded in his previous email). The subject of this email starts off by telling me not to be upset and that he really didn’t mean to do that…

Uh, I wasn’t upset. Really. In fact, I COULDN’T CARE LESS about you and your problems, you whiny bastard!!!

Jesus H. Christ on a kebab, if running this damned business is so damned horrible then just quit, will you, and leave us subscribers in peace with our purchases! I don’t want to hear about how awful your job is. I don’t want to hear how serving me is ruining your life. I don’t care if cutting the price is taking food out of the mouth of your wife and kids. And if that’s really the case, then you’re either an irresponsible ass or an incompetent boob. Neither option is helping you sell me anything, dude.

I would soooo unsubscribe in a heartbeat, but the service I bought does give me a lot of access to useful stuff at a decent rate and it is really important to me to know if that services changes in any way (new fees, changes in access, website moves, etc). So I stay on the line.

But damn. I don’t know what flaming arse-candle ever told Eeyore that this Masochistic Marketing approach was a good idea. But I’m telling you…if I ever find that copywriter of doom, his next “life is hell” email will actually be the God’s own truth. And I promise, I won’t feel the slightest bit sorry about it at all.

Tags: Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity by Soni Pitts
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Scary Monkey Says, “Granny Pr0n Is Not A Marketing Stragegy!”

The battle for the Great Internet Eyeball has reached a fever pitch. Everywhere you look, advertisers are running more and more outlandish ads in a desperate attempt to attract attention, and audiences are getting more savvy, becoming more ad-blind and arming themselves with better tools whose sole purpose is keeping those selfsame ads out of their face while they go about their daily Internet rituals.

If you run a business, then our very own bad biz cymbal-banger, Scary Monkey, has a message that you need to hear loud and clear: This is a battle you can not win.

You cannot force someone to want your product or buy your product or even momentarily consider your product by shoving more and more annoying, frequent, hyped, insulting, degrading, disgusting or just plain stupid ads in their face.

What you can do, however, is pretty much guarantee that they will loathe you, that they will go out of their way to avoid any further contact with you and that next time you get ready to launch an advertising campaign it will be even that much harder to get their attention.

Case in point - the disgusting and much loathed “granny boobs” ad campaign put out by coupon and deals service, Dealnews.

[Read more →]

Tags: Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity by Soni Pitts
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In my previous post, I was ranting about the craptacular blog host where my personal blog is currently ensconced, and why I’m currently in the process of bailing.

In this post, I explain why my complaints are not simply me being bitchy, but actually add up to a bad business model that you would do well to not emulate.

[Read more →]

Tags: Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity by Soni Pitts
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Meet Scary Monkey (cadged from the collection of Ale Paiva over at the Stock Xchange). I’ve chosen Scary Monkey to be my mascot for all things craptacular in the business and marketing world. When you see Scary Monkey, you know someone has stepped in it. Let’s see who’s leaving stinky footprints today, shall we?

The Large Print Giveth, and the Small Print Taketh Away

The other day, I won one of those business card drawings at a local Chamber of Commerce event. Along with a nice package of handmade boutique soaps, I received a certificate from Mountain View Tire and Service here in Asheville for a free oil change. Sweet! As you can imagine, I was very excited to win this particular prize and since it was just about time for an oil change on my truck anyway, it was doubly pleasant.

BTW, this is a great way to get new customers. After all, many of you offer services and products that create repeat sales by their very nature and this is an easy, cheap way of entering new markets and getting a larger memeshare of the market. In this case, oil changes have to be done regularly and this brief explosion of joy on my part could have translated into a long-term customer relationship assuming they didn’t completely screw it up, which, since an oil change is a dead simple procedure, would have been very unlikely.

But that’s not going to happen now because, as they say, “The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.” Turns out that what I “won” wasn’t a free oil change certificate at all, but merely a discount coupon. In teeny-tiny print that’s barely visible in the shadow of the large-font exhortations of the fine “OIL, LUBE & FILTER WITH 14 POINT INSPECTION” that I didn’t really win is a note that says: ” With purchase of 4 select Goodyear tires.”

Uh, excuse me? A new set of tires is an expensive proposition, and one that is only considered when it’s actually time for new tires, not at random intervals and certainly not just to get a free oil change. An oil change with purchase of new tires is a nice premium - for people who are actually looking to buy tires. But it’s hardly a prize for someone who isn’t.

ROI and Customer Retention

Now, as anyone who’s been in business for more than a few minutes knows, unless you are running a monopoly (and probably even then) the cost of acquiring a new customer (making that first sale to the unsure, the wary and the potential one-night-stander) is far, far higher in terms of effort and actual expenses than the cost of selling to an existing customer (who, if they’re still a customer after that first sale, is already convinced that type of product or services you sell are worth throwing money at and has already established a habit of throwing that money at you to get them). So getting clients is expensive and keeping old ones is cheap and lucrative, since the “selling” has already been done.

This prize, had it been an actual prize and not a crappy coupon, could have created a long-term customer out of me for the price of a basic service (which has a very low cost to the provider and a high markup to the customer, says she who has taken two years of auto maintenance and knows exactly what goes into this service, money- and otherwise). After all, it’s not like I’ll never be needing another oil change again. Or some other related service. Or even tires, for that matter. (Although I buy Cooper, not Goodyear. Yes that’s a plug. They’re great tires.).

But now, instead of a satisfied customer with the rosy, happy association to this company of someone who’s been given something they needed for free, they have a pissed off blogger with an internet connection and a burning desire (akin to the feeling you get from an STD) never to go anywhere near them in the future and to make sure no one else does either. (Just in case you think I’m just ranting over a lost oil change, I’m not. Hubs and I aren’t rolling in dough, but we do okay. I can afford the oil change. It’s the whole “treating the customer like an eternally fleecy sheep to be shorn” bit that rankles.)

Good work, Mountain View Tire and Service of Asheville (yes, I am Google-baiting, why do you ask)! You’ve managed to turn what could have been a great promotional idea into a massively negative opinion that is far out of proportion to the actual damage done, because not only do I not have a free oil change that I thought I had, I also feel jerked around and treated like some sort of mentally deficient idiot who would say, “Sure, I’ll buy a set of expensive tires I don’t need, because otherwise I’ll lose this here free oil change, worth less than $50.00.”

I feel disrespected, insulted, ripped off (even though I bought nothing, I “had” something that was then taken away) and angry. All that for the price of an oil change.

Don’t Be a Selfish Bastard

The moral of the story is, don’t be a selfish bastard if you want to make new customers. Coupons are all well and good, and premiums have their place. But if you’re handing out prizes, freebies, giveaways, samples, etc., don’t tie them down with craptacular fine print. Generosity is its own reward and Scrooging your customers because you’re a scarcity-minded loser is a negative-sum way to do business.

Tags: Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity, Business by Soni Pitts
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