When Marketing Backfires - a Mini-Rant (just for fun)

Last week, a telemarketer called us to schedule an appointment to talk to us about our telemarketing needs.  She called for the CEO and left a voice mail which he then shared with me via email.  This firm, she suggests, is staffed with very professional telemarketers and has a great success rate.  The problem?  Well, the telemarketer who called to sell us on telemarketing was clearly reading from a script.  Pauses in the wrong places, a bit sing-song in her delivery, and totally unconvincing.  Oh yes, exactly the kind of service that we want representing our firm.  Telemarketing FAIL.

Today, someone reached out to me via LinkedIn with the statement that his firm could help in our marketing efforts, particularly in the area of social media.  He offered that we could affiliate ourselves with his firm, or (gasp) even hire them to do our social media outreach.  When I saw that his firm was in the same city, I clicked through to the website to learn more about them - exactly what you'd hope someone would do, right?  It's hard to describe the growing dismay I felt as I read through their web pages.  This organization has never heard of a semicolon; sentences like this one would have a comma where I placed the semicolon.  Incomplete sentences.  Questions that end in periods.  The best part, though, was the content.  How about this sentence:  "Bob is married to his beautiful wife and has five children."  Would Bob be married to anyone other than his wife?  Does this mean that the children are his by a different wife?  Finally, the "Meet the Management" section of the website has a profile of one person (and yes, he is married to his beautiful wife), thereby indicating that this is a very small operation indeed.  He also apparently is holding down two jobs to make ends meet, because the website clearly states that "Bob," the Founder and CEO of this company is also the EVP of Sales for another company, and though that other company is this company's parent, it sure implies that this company isn't very busy.  They've certainly taken themselves out of contention for any business, affiliation, or recommendation based on the content they've created for themselves.  (Note that had this company been selling anything other than content, I would not be nearly so concerned.) Website FAIL.

Finally, over the weekend, I was on the Facebook page of a giant retail organization, reading the postings of both that organizaton and its "fans."  A fan posted that they wanted to know where to get a particular product that had been introduced over the summer.  A number of other fans posted helpful hints, but the conversation came to a quick close when someone, not identified as a rep of the organization but sure sounding like one, stated that the product "sold out of stores in less than a month.  Limited means limited."  It just came across as rather snippy to me, and I hope it was not a representative of the organization in question.  The lack of engagement on a very popular Facebook page was a bit surprising, in fact.  Facebook FAIL.

As we all know, marketing is more today than it has ever been - more than coffee mugs and logo-bearing pens, more than press releases and campaigns.  Every opportunity to engage in conversation is marketing.  Every representation of your organizaton out there in the world is marketing.  Every community in which you participate with your brand is... yes, that is marketing too.  Every bit of marketing should be on-brand, consistent, and for pete's sake, spelled correctly, punctuated correctly, and stated correctly.  Marketing can backfire if no one is watching.

You might be wondering what all this has to do with IT.  Well, we hope you don't mind that these stories actually have pretty much nothing to do with IT.  Sometimes, "ya just gotta rant."

Rant over.  Do you have any similar stories to share?