Arrogance in politics is self destructive, arrogance in personal relations is self destructive. It follows that arrogance in business is not only self destructive but bloody stupid. Being arrogant and stupid in pushing your “product” on the net makes you not only self destructive and stupid, but part of the seemingly ever growing legion of scam-ware. A scam doesn’t need to be a rip off of a consumer, or a customer. A scam can equally be directly responsible for damaging the reputation of others for the direct purpose of making a profit.
So it came as a surprise to read across at the 37Signals blog about GetSatisfaction. Please Click Here in order to read the full details as to how the company GetSatisfaction affected their company, and no, I’m not a 37Signals customer or even a regular reader of their blog.
Not to be outdone as a regular arrogant and destructive SOB I figured what the hey – this is certainly a good example of what not to do for ISV’s.
OK. Read the 37Signals post? I don’t want to rehash the details here. They are covered well enough in the blog post linked above. The point I want to make is this. Businesses used to deliver to their customers a modicum of respect through something known as a “Gentleman’s Agreement.” Basically this meant it was taboo to directly do anything that negatively impacted on another business, such as disparaging a competitor, using their logo or brand (Trademark anybody?) in a manner that would give a member of the public or another business the impression they were dealing with that company when in actual fact they weren’t.
What this means is that the rare company that did engage in these tactics flopped. You felt that if they had no respect for anybody else they’d not respect you or your property either. So you ditched them if you were their customer or you avoided them for the future if you were not.
That’s what I’ll be doing with the company GetSatisfaction. I don’t deal with people who are not “gentlemanly” – read – “ethical”. To pretend that you are some kind of official outlet for another, plagiarise their logo and mention their name everywhere – and then – demonise them in the sense that you accuse them of:
“Company XYZ has not yet committed to an open conversation about its products and services.”
Hang on – say what? GetSatisfaction is acting like some kind of “open community” here on some kind of ideological social crusade but GetSatisfaction is first and foremost a commercial entity that sells it’s service to companies as a venue for offering customer support on the internet. This is qualifies for dirty, scammy and downright unethical in my book. Dirty because it’s a low blow to the very companies they seek to make their clients by popping the quote above in small text by way of disclaimer. Scammy because they are indirectly implying they represent the companies in question when they do not through the use of logos and company name repetition (the target company, not their own company name) and unethical because it’s looks like a chapter out of an episode from Bastards Inc –
Ewen at 37Signals states:
Now that’s unethical on the part of GetSatisfaction. Indeed it qualifies as downright “bastard” in my book.
SHAME on GetSatisfaction.
Don’t resort to this technique folks. It’s pathetic and low. Believe it or not some people (many people) do have a moral sense and do comport themselves with dignity. My suggestion to GetSatisfaction founders is this:
- Attend some classes on the basic principles of business ethics.
- Familiarize yourself with trademark law.
- Study customer and consumer reaction beyond seeing how you can take advantage of it.
- Get a bloody clue!
I urge ISVs – micro and beyond – not to resort to this in their marketing. Shine because you are ethical. Offering an open community for the purposes of support and indeed to shine a light if needed on a lack of support from companies is a worthwhile goal – but to utilize it in a manner that gives the direct impression that the consumer is dealing with the company when they are not, to use that companies logos and business name over and over (Google food?) to support that suggestion is crappy, cruddy, scammy and unethical.
Don’t be a bastard!
Scott Kane
Quote of the day:
[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. – Al Capp
Hi Scott,
I’m one of the founders of Get Satisfaction, and wanted to pipe in and say that we agree wholeheartedly about the importance of ethics in business, and public accountability. After all, it’s why we started our company! I’ve detailed here (http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2009/03/31/open-letter-to-jason-fried/) how we made such an obvious mistake, but suffice to say that it was a redesign effort a few weeks ago during which we over-optimized for one use case (ie. most companies who are added to get satisfaction are added by themselves). The wording in that controversial badge was the result of robotically changing two words from the participating-company version in the middle of a complicated project, and honestly didn’t reflect a business strategy.
We’ve been in business for a couple years, and we founders have been very public in tying our personal reputations to what we’re doing. We screwed up here, and are moving with haste to address the inadvertent confusion. You can blame me personally if it helps, but our larger purpose of fostering honest public dialog between customers and companies shouldn’t get lost in the melee.
Anyway, I do appreciate your passion, and hope we can still be friends
G’day Thor,
Thanks for taking the time to comment. Have read the links you provided. Thank you for that. Very glad to hear you are taking immediate steps to remedy this. Looking forward to seeing the results.
Good post, Scott. It brought my attention to the issue, I didn’t realise this was “going down”.
You might be interested to read GetSatisfaction’s responses. I think they’ve handled the response well and credit to them for making moves to address the issue.
First the two posts by GS:
http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2009/03/31/kissing-and-making-up-with-37signals/
http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2009/03/31/open-letter-to-jason-fried/
Then another from 37:
http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1661-follow-up-on-get-satisfaction-or-else
Best,
Mike
Hi Mike,
Thanks for the links. I’m glad they are stating they are taking action on this. I look forward to seeing those steps implemented.
There is certainly a lesson in this, whether it be accidental or not in terms of what transpired. Due dilligence is not a luxury it’s an imperitive for each of us in our businesses. We learned in physics in high school that each action has an equal re-action, no matter how surprising that re-action may seem to us when it occurs.
Until I read your blog post (and 37signal’s) I had no idea how GetSatisfaction is misrepresenting things. I honestly thought that all of the companies I saw represented there were participating on their own accord. Evidently, that’s not entirely true. Great post! That being said, I wonder about the legality of it all.
Chris
Hi Chris,
I was disapointed to see it too. Thor is assuring us it was a genuine mistake and he’s fixing it. As soon as
I hear/see more in respect of that I’ll publish an update.
I disagree with your sentiments. They way you portray your vision of how an ‘ethical’ business should be, we should not be allowed to ever comment on anyone’s business practices. This flies in the face of freedom of speech.
If someone wants to launch a business venture, the onus is on them to strive to manage positive customer relationships. The onus is never placed on the community. In other words, community at large does not owe anyone a living.
If someone opens up a venting/support venue that will allow my customers to enact their needs regarding my business services, the onus is on me to be vigilant and take care of all affairs that pertain to my business. It’s no use crying foul or asking the nanny state to protect my business. Protectionism is never an ethical business practice, period.
As soon as you open yourself up to the community, you’ve gotta take the good with the bad. The community is free to organize themselves any way they see fit. In this case, the community effort resulted in the Get Satisfaction site, where anyone in the world can open up a support/venting venue regarding any business. So business better sit up and pay attention to these efforts, or else they might as well fold.
No business has any right to demand that their customers only deal with them through their official channels. Monopolizing the resources in such fashion would be preposterous. And that’s exactly what 37signals are doing. And that, my friend, is very unethical to their customers.
Hi Alex and thanks for commenting.
We’ll have to agree to disagree then because some of us are “old school” in respect of ethics.
However, having said that, while I certainly do concentrate on my views regarding ethics in this article there remains the fact that GetSatisfaction took logos and text belonging to another entity. That would seem to be, at minimum, periloulsy close to trademark infringement. Something I would not tolerate nor would I expect any other outside of the context of a “fair use” which this certainly was not. In addition the implication that somehow 37Signals (and many other businesses) are guilty of neglecting customer support by not being on GetSatisfaction as customers. Now, as a marcom to the business concerned, yeah that’s a selling point, but not when you are using that marcom to the clients of that business.
“No business has any right to demand that their customers only deal with them through their official channels.”
Actually – they do. It’s called “support agreements” (contracts) and it gets horribly muddied with issues of IP too.
Thanks for clarifying, Scott. I’m in complete agreement with you, providing that we remain on the “old school” business turf.
However, conducting the business on the web has absolutely nothing to do with old school ethics. It is new school, through and through. Hence the radical, deeply disruptive and subversive nature of the web. People can stick their heads in the sand and pretend that it isn’t so, but it ain’t going to help in the least.
For example, on the web anyone is free to rip any logos and to remix them to their hearts content. Same is true for any other content. Again, that’s the very nature of the web. The web is a giant copying machine, and people and businesses better get used to that fact, or else remain vexed and frustrated.
As for the trademark infringement that you’ve mentioned, that’s 100% old school. Trademark was invented in the days when it was incredibly costly and difficult to rip and copy and remix any content; only big businesses were in the position to do so. Naturally, legal mechanisms had to be put in place to protect businesses from such unfair competition.
But today, in the age of unlimited copying, when a 8 year old kid can rip all those copy protected logos and what not and mix them and burn them, it would be ridiculous to unleash the dream team of lawyers and sue that kid’s ass in court.
Stupidity knows no bounds, of course, so we shouldn’t be surprised if such cases are already happening, but the only party that benefits from such stupidity are the lawyers collecting their exorbitant hourly fees.
What I’m suggesting is that we stop feeding the lawyers, and deal with this at the community level.
As for the “support agreement” you’ve mentioned — these are also old school. Time to make the transition to 21st century and embrace the web for what it truly is.
Not so sure the Net is such a big difference between old school and new though. Over the last two decades online now I’ve seen the same kind of behaviours cause the same failures and visa versa.
We tend to forget that issues of morality are biologically wired into us as humans. Social interaction and the rules around it haven’t changed at the basic level at all.
I’m going to be quite frank on the issue of lawyer handling and community handling. At the end of the day community handling rarely works and rarely gets an outcome for an injured party, which is why we have lawyers and laws and is also why I’m entirely happy to use them as and where I need to do so.
The consequences of using them of course in respect of the party they are aimed at at the end of the day is entirely the point. It’s how we reorientate balance. Anarchy and business are not compatible bed fellows.
I stumbled across this post digging around looking for some customer service type software that would have a look and feel like Get Satisfaction.
See I stumbled onto Get Satisfaction a few days or so ago and really liked its forum style and much about it as far as trying to build a open communication relationship with my customers.
I am a small, owner operated Internet services company that has been in business since 1999 and I have about 300 or so customers. I’d like to try and get them to have a more open dialogue with me about needs, wants, gripes, anything that might foster a growing relationship. I thought Get satisfaction might be a way to get some participation.
But then as I stumbled around here and also read the 37signals posts I began to wonder. I mean, there was one thing in particular that really bothered me about the Get Satisfaction model and that was that the difference between the features of the free version and the first level $99 version were huge. Primarily, can’t moderate, delete, modify or otherwise edit a post on the free version.
So you gotta pay $99 a month and as a small company just seeing about if this model is going to work or not for us, well $99 a month is a bit much. But then I saw this from one of the GS people over on the 37signals blog: “There is absolutely no charge to participate on Get Satisfaction. We offer premium tools to help with moderation, analytics, etc. It is the freemium model. No one need pay to join in.”
Well, simply not true or rather doublespeak at best. It is a freemium model for such a basic version as to be almost useless. If you want any of those other features its $99 or more a month.
Well the real kicker is that in the process of reading these blogs I found out about UserVoice. So I peek in over there and it looks a lot like Get Satisfaction. Did Get Satisfaction basically rip them off or what?
But more importantly it looks like I can have a cute looking feedback forum similar to what Get Satisfaction offers and be able to moderate it for only $19 bucks a month. And it appears I can customize text so it is not necessarily a feedback forum but an “I have an idea” forum or “I have a gripe” forum or whatever.. So if that is the case maybe UserVoice is my best choice. Jury is still out but anyways, thats my thoughts on this subject.
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for reading and commenting. I agree with your points. Personally I much rather control my own forums, website and blogs. We’ve tried this “one stop shop” type websites since the mid nineties. Very few have survived or even had a limited amount of sucess. Exceptions being the likes of eBay and similar. Even then eBay is a businesses model in rapid evolution with a lot of controversey going with it.
my God, i thought you were going to chip in with some decisive insght at the end there, not leave it with
I’m inclined to agree with the author, I don’t know where some of the other commentators here are coming from. He’s right. Ethics in business is like coffee and cream. Hopefully GetSatisfaction will GetChapterEleven.