About half of my tech support emails and phone calls involve lost, incorrect or insufficient passwords. So you can imagine my delight if everyone used secure password generators and, above all else, didn’t lose their new passwords.

“L.” didn’t even bother mentioning the password generator (I found that out by browsing PassPack myself).

In fact, it was a tech support call that inspired me to post that technique.

However…
Casually shoehorning a product somewhere (anywhere) isn’t my idea of relavancy.

Those toung-in-cheek questions I asked in a previous post was to point this out.

This type of advertising will always encourage abuses. It starts off with a mistake here and there, and eventually boils down to outright spam.

I understand PR/Advertising people need to think on their feet, but there needs to be certain rules and guidelines to follow. Actions need to be delimited by appropriateness.

I belive that is impossible as long as a company insists on adhering to some random concept about “Evangelism” by a marketing exec with an MBA.

In other words… “Don’t believe the hype!”

My above sentence made no sense…typing to fast

If I happened to work for/be involved in a company that works with other companies in PR/developing trust with target markets/developing market reach (which I don’t, but that’s neither here nor there) I wouldn’t necessarily feel out of context to reference such a company’s blog in this discussion as it is assumable that they would discuss such issues.

In the context of these referenced comments they applied only on the fringes of the general conversation (passwords) and didn’t contribute to the specific conversation (”good” passwords). That I see as the difference. If I or others work for a company/have a product that directly helps solve the specific conversation/problem I don’t shame them for mentioning it. I appreciate that they openly state that they have a vested interest in the product (and would be irritated if they didn’t).

In these specific conversations PassPack does have tools that directly related to the conversation (for example a built in password generator with varying levels of complexity based upon a specific sites rules for passwords. A complex generated password I would argue is even more secure then a password system as you reference at your blog, although that is better than what many of us use.)

Actually it is “rarely” in the eye of the beholder. If the obvious truth here cannot be seen in thos comments, then those eyes aren’t working properly.. LASIK anyone?

BTW…
For anyone looking for that Tom Coates incident, here’s the archive :

http://www.plasticbag.org/archives/2005/09/on_cillit_bang_and_a_new_low_for_marketers/

The “offending comment” :

“Hi Tom, Always remember one thing. Life is very, very short and nothing is worth limiting yourself from seeing the ones you love. I hadn’t seen my father in 15 years until 2 years ago. I was apprehensive but I kept telling myself that no matter how estranged we’d become there was no river to wide to cross. Drop me a line if I can be of any more help. Cheers, Barry”

Actually it’s good that you brought that up, Deirdré. Feel free to see what happened there, folks.

I’ll let everyone else decide what happened on the Tom Coates blog. I’m considering this a completely unrelated incident.

“Evangelism” in the context of this situation, and general corporate lingo, is spam.
Plain and simple.
There’s not blurry line. No dubious definiton. No misunderstood intent.

It’s the age old car salesman tactic of showing interest in what you need and what you’re saying and trying to push a business card on you.

I can point to the sky and call it green, but that doesn’t make it so. This is what happens when people start blindly accepting their own manufactured buzzwords.

For the record.
I don’t have to cut L. or D. any slack as they don’t work for me. That’s for Tara to decide.

For now, I’m waiting for them to talk it over and decide if buzzwords are really any substitute for substance.

This reminds me of a blow-up on Tom Coates’ blog a couple of years ago, when someone running around the web marketing Cillit Bang (a cleaning product) left a comment commiserating with Tom for the loss of his father. This person was soundly berated for inappropriately marketing a product in connection with a personal tragedy, when in fact the product was never mentioned except in the URL. As I pointed out at the time, it might be that the person, in the course of other blog marketing duties, saw a post he or she empathized with and simply left a truly felt condolence. The fact that a marketing URL was attached is neither here nor there - many blogging platforms fill in the URL for you if you’re a multiple poster.

The lesson I draw is that, on both sides of the marketing relationship, it helps if we all simply treat each other as human beings. Why not cut L. and D. some slack for the fact that they’re new and enthusiastic and still have some ropes to learn? They are new members of the community of PassPack enthusiasts and, like all newbies, they’re bound to step on some toes. Be kind. At some time or other, you’ve been a newbie, too.