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As the reputation and identity management market continues to heat up, last week’s press release from iKarma made my head spin trying to figure out the core message. The press release is a perfect example of trying to say too many things and ending up frustrating the reader. It’s imperative that companies stay away from what I call Buzzword Bingo when attempting to promote their companies.
“Viral Marketing Pandemic Unleashed”
“iKarma Mixes Viral Marketing and Social Networking With Word-of-Mouth and Reputation Management”
“Get Viral and Sticky, RSS Linked and Web 2.0 Clique”
If I was a small business owner reading this I would be quite confused. Any company needs to clearly explain the problem, the core offering (solution), what are the benefits over how I spend my hard-earned dollars currently, how much does it cost and finally how do I learn more about it? Unless you hit these marks the release falls flat, as is the case here.
Then again, I took the time to read the release and wrote about it.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Paul Williams – CEO of iKarma
I would like to assure everyone that iKarma is not responsible for the spam you have been tortured with these past few days. iKarma is in the online reputation business so you can imagine how angry we are that spammers are currently soiling our reputation.
Some people have commented that because this spam is “promoting� iKarma that we must somehow be behind this abuse. But we find it hard to believe that any reasonable person reading this spam can conclude it would do us more good than harm.
We suspect this spam was designed to produce the exact angry response it did in you. The spammers appear to be taunting those who complain by sending them additional emails. In some cases it appears that they are using the email addresses of complainers as the forged sender on their next spam in order to further enrage those most likely to complain.
Our business at iKarma depends on our ability to contact our users without getting blocked. So sending spam is the last thing we would do to promote our company. We also depend on a positive public reputation.
I regret that this spam is causing both of us so much aggravation and I hope this letter to you will in some way help redeem iKarma in your eyes. We have posted a notice on the front of our web site and we are working with all of our resources to discover who is doing this and to make them stop.
Sincerely,
Paul Williams
CEO
iKarma Inc.