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What Happens When You Swear At Your Users
- cq 15y agoPlease don't beat yourselves up about this, only men use the internet anyway. Men definitely wouldn't be offended by this misogynist word
- krmmalik 15y agoPersonally, i really don't like to see profanity in a professional context, but having said that...i really like the way these guys handled it, and not only that, their honesty and transparency really endears me towards them. Edit: Interestingly enough, come from Britain, i think something like this would fair worse of in the UK. I think we're a little more 'stiff' than our US counterparts.
- mindcrime 15y agoI think we're a little more 'stiff' than our US counterparts. Sure, until you've had a few pints in you! Then you lot are apt to do anything... Or maybe I just read too much "Bastard Operator from Hell."
- krmmalik 15y agoYeah it can and does happen but fortunately its outside the workplace so an event such as this probably wouldnt be the result of a drunken stupor ;-)
- vacri 15y agoI think it depends on which demographics in the UK and which demographics in the US you happen to be talking about...
- roel_v 15y agoThe problem (well it's not even really a problem I guess) is that nowadays you're not sure any more if this was an 'accidental' slip up, or a bold marketing tactic. They surely are getting a lot more exposure with the 'slip up', and if it had backfired, well who cares really - in 2 months time nobody will remember. Maybe I've been on the internet for too long and have become too skeptical.
- MicahWedemeyer 15y agoI've learned over the years to never put profanity or anything even mildly offensive in test data. Too many times have I had to give an impromptu presentation off my test database, only to see user names like "Asshat Joe" and "Jack Off" show up big and bold on the projector screen. Always, always use plain, non-offensive vanilla boilerplate text in everything you do.
- tomjen3 15y agoThat is a good idea, but most people can find one or more offensive words in enough data, even if it is just the dump of names in the local community.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Lewisham 15y agoYeah, I've been trying to bang into the heads of the students that I TA that "there is no test data - only fake data." Test data always seems, to me, to mean meaningless junk. Names like addresses to Dicksville, IL do nothing but accidentally get leaked to someone they shouldn't, and they can't be validated, which creates a whole nest of testing problems. Fake data, like John Doe, San Francisco, CA, doesn't share these problems.
- gaelenh 15y agoI read a story a couple years ago about a couple who had there home raided over 50 times over a 4-5 year period by NYPD. Turns out there address was used as test data in the system, and it was leaking into the police's forms/database. So, if using fake data, make sure it can't be mistaken with an actual address/phone number/dna sequence.
- justincormack 15y agoThere are already defined sets of telephone numbers that can be used for fake data http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_telephone_number http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_telephone_number Also of course example.com. Not sure if there are non routeable physical addresses.
- harryf 15y agoAs they say - the only bad press is no press at all.
- gyardley 15y agoThey do say this, but they say it about Hollywood celebrities. For startups, most of the time bad press is just plain bad.
- SoftwareMaven 15y agoI really hope every brand doesn't decide to start swearing at me. Personally, after having a product that was supposed to be "the next step" in our company's evolution get blasted in the press because a developer left a smartass comment in (Google "you have to install directx dumbass"), my policy is NO profanity, period, in any string, any test message, anything. If you are trying to build a brand around it, great. Make a conscious decision and go with it. But doing it to be funny, "just amongst the team", has a nasty way of biting you.
- khyryk 15y agoNo results found for "you have to install directx dumbass". Am I missing something?
- yread 15y agoOrem, Utah-based Viewpoint DataLabs, which managed to include the following in its LiveArt install: Setup is unable to locate a suitable version of DirectX on your machine. You will need to install DirectX before you can use LiveArt98, dumbass! http://funehumor.com/fun_doc3/fun_0303.shtml http://funehumor.com/fun_doc3/fun_0303.shtml
- corin_ 15y agohttp://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9810/06/errormess.idg/ http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9810/06/errormess.idg/
- shrikant 15y agoI guess parent means this: http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9810/06/errormess.idg/ http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9810/06/errormess.idg/
- spqr 15y agoYeah, use bing. I found it as the top result. Plus they pay you to use them with Bing Rewards.
- mindcrime 15y ago
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- djsla 15y agoIt is a clever (accidental?) marketing, but will the traffic stick? Naturally, after reading the post, I went to check what fetchnotes is all about and... could not figure it after 30 seconds of scanning the homepage and left. Anyone else had that problem?
- 5teev 15y agoI had the opposite reaction: this smacks of amateurishness, leaving me skeptical of the overall product.
- stefs 15y agothey've been lucky. it might work once for a small, "personal" startup or a company that centers its marketing strategy on being political incorrect. but it also could have gone terribly wrong.
- joering2 15y agomind sharing "how"?
- spqr 15y agoChange the word from b* to c* and see how many women leave the service. Once you imagine that, picture that c* is only a few degrees past b* in the minds of many women.
- buckwild 15y agoIt shows un-professionalism. Users will associate that character trait with the company. What would you think if you received a similar email from Apple or Google?
- bomatson 15y agoAlex - Great job handling this, I received the bitches e-mail and got a good chuckle out of it! Hope the traffic sticks for your team
- bradleyland 15y agoThis probably goes without saying, but your user demographic has a lot to do with how this kind of mishap will be received. Our product sells to Fortune 1000 companies in the procurement software space. I can tell you, unequivocally, that the users of our product have a distinct lack of tolerance with regard to "lack of attention to detail". We've had a debug message or two slip through to production, and the conversation that follows is never comfortable. The inevitable conclusion they reach is that if we miss one small thing, we're likely to miss another. Sometimes you really do have to sweat the small stuff.
- yonasb 15y agoExactly what I was thinking when I read this. If their users had been parents 40+, I'm willing to bet they'd have a slightly different reaction.
- mayoff 15y agoAs a 41 year old parent of a 16-month old, I can say that some of us are still humans with a sense of humor.
- bradleyland 15y agoWe definitely have customers that would find something like this funny, but we have plenty of large customers that wouldn't. When your ASP is around $100k a year, you really want to avoid losing even a single customer to something silly like using unprofessional language in a test email.
- sirclueless 15y agoI can only speak for myself, but I certainly have considerably more of a sense of humor and tolerance for mistakes in a product that costs $2 versus one that costs $2000. If you are charging me serious dough, then you better damn well have your ducks in a row. If you are offering a free product, then all you need is enough redeeming qualities to hold my attention.
- petercooper 15y agoThis would make for an interesting split test. Patrick..?
- gergles 15y agoEven not using profanity but just failing to have someone else review all your translation strings can cause a serious problem: http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/images/acidiot.gif http://homepage.mac.com/bradster/iarchitect/images/acidiot.g...
- alexrbarlow 15y agoInteresting, I think its a nice reminder that the same old emails are boring to most users
- mikaelcho 15y agoCD Baby had a great e-mail that they sent users after an order: "Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, December 11th. I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year". We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!! Thank you once again, Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby"
- GnomeChomsky 15y agoSorry this is slightly off-topic, but I'm curious about the product here. Why should I use it? What problem is it solving for me? Halfway down the homepage it says, "Don’t Change: Use Fetchnotes with Google Apps, Evernote, Outlook and all the other services you already love." Which was a great reminder that I already have a ton of other services trying to get me to keep notes in them... what's different about Fetchnotes and why isn't this plastered all over the homepage? /unsolicited feedback
- mindcrime 15y agoWe won’t be throwing around profanity in our emails, but we’re definitely going to try to take a more “real” tone rather than the false formality that pervades most company communications. This, to me, is the key takeaway from all this. That "false formality" is a killer, IMO. I personally try very hard to avoid it when writing Fogbeam Labs stuff, like our blog[1], but it's SOOO easy to slip into that mode. Keeping that out and maintaining a "real" conversational tone is tough, but I believe it's better in the long run. (No, I haven't A/B tested this or anything, it's just a hunch). [1]: http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/ http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/
- 5teev 15y agoIt's minimizing the offense a great deal to call the word "bitches" a "swear" and not misogyny.
- Resident_Geek 15y ago"Misogyny" means "hatred of women", nothing more, nothing less. This is not misogyny by any stretch of the imagination.
- lazerwalker 15y agoDebate over the term 'misogyny' aside, there is a difference between a word that's simply profane (pick your favorite term for poop/sex) and a word like 'bitch', which is generally frowned upon by the feminist community as being seriously degrading to women.
- 5teev 15y agoWell, by some stretch it is: this is a word most women don't like to be called, and when referring to men, at least part of the offense is that it's bad to be a woman.
- burgerbrain 15y agoMen don't like to be called that either though... Interestingly enough, going by industry statistics, chances are in this case whoever was meant to read it were men.
- 5teev 15y ago"Men don't like to be called that either though..." That was my point: the intended offense is partly in feminizing the man, as if being feminine is bad in itself.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- andywood 15y agoThis really would have been more responsibly titled "What Happened When We Swore At Our Users That One Time".
- kenrik 15y agoYeah I would not recommend this be made standard practice however I personally would love to get an email like that as it does "show some personality". Things like this are why everyone stays for the bloopers at the end of a movie. ;)
- ggwicz 15y agoI like swearing in copy because I don't want to take money from somebody stupid enough to be offended by "bad words". It's a great filter.
- patio11 15y agoYou shouldn't say radioactively stupid things to your customers, but you should get their permission to talk to them and then proceed to do so, because that will predictably raise engagement, retention, and many other things you might be interested in tracking. Look at the graph. Look at the "I had totally forgotten about you until you sweared at me, now I might actually use the service" testimony. These things can be yours without swearing. I've been worried for the last five years that I don't send enough email. After having worked closely with some clients who have figured things out, this strikes me as less "a missed opportunity" and more "an oversight as glaring as being unable to spell SEO." They get tremendous value out of connecting with their customers on a semi-regular basis, and (this part truly blows my email-hating-spam-squashing mind) so do their customers.
- DanBC 15y agoToday you accidentally send out a test email (with the word bitches). That makes me worried that tomorrow you'll accidentally send out another email leaking my details, or something similar. I'm glad you didn't suffer too much for this small error, but the small errors can have big consequences.
- itmag 15y agoThe bitches who got offended over this are drama queens who should get the sand out of their vaginas and redirect their attention to something worthier than petty trifles and smallminded grudgebearing.
- AtTheLast 15y agoI've always been a fan of connecting to users on a more human and personable level. This might have been an accident, but it made FetchNotes feel more human and have a sense of humor. I think most people really appreciate this, considering the majority of websites are bland and full of generic marketing text.
- runjake 15y agoDemographics are everything. To this old dinosaur, I'd question your maturity and whether I'd want to be a customer in the future -- especially if you have any of my personal data. Unlike some of the other commenters below, I don't think it's an issue of whether you have a "sense of humor" or not. YMMV.
- rickmb 15y ago> we’re definitely going to try to take a more “real” tone rather than the false formality that pervades most company communications This makes me wonder if by now there is an entire generation of tech entrepreneurs that has never read the Cluetrain Manifesto: http://www.cluetrain.com/ http://www.cluetrain.com/
- timthorn 15y agoThere's a difference between formal language and the corporate lexicon. Formality is a form of respect, but managementspeak is essentially a political creation.
- alexschiff 15y agoHi all, Alex Schiff, co-founder and CEO of Fetchnotes here (and author of this post). The quality of discussion on the things we post to Hacker News never ceases to amaze us! I just wanted to point out that we posted an invite link by which 1000 people can get access to our beta on the blog post itself. You can also get in directly with this link: www.fetchnotes.com/invite/blogpost Thanks!
- adavies42 15y agocan i just say your combination of background and link color is incredibly annoying?
- ndefinite 15y agoI just noticed there's nt link to your product or homepage from your blog. I wanted to click to learn about what your product is but there's nothing there. Not the end of the world for me, I can copy from the address bar but I wonder if you're missing out on conversions. Cool story though. I got a kick out of the customer responding back "...bitches"
- verelo 15y agoI know the feeling! I was once part of a team who accidentally sent a communication where we updated our privacy policy, stating specifically that we would never share your email address with anyone. Sounds normal right? The catch is, we sent it to 1000 people per batch, and rather than bcc'ing everyone, we used the "to" field. Whoops? Luckily we caught the issue after the first batch, i have no idea to this day how it slipped through QA however. Similar result however, people didn't like it but many just wanted to point it out to us (and we did our best at saying sorry) I totally got where they were coming from, however we're human and life went back to normal eventually. Lesson learned!
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- wiradikusuma 15y agoI was working on some XML stuff and put superhero names in the test XML file. A week or so, some QA guy asked for sample XML and I gave it to him. Before I knew it, my test file was circulated in QA and Business Analysts for testing. I guess they didn't read what's inside or didn't bother. Then our client came and the BAs gave demo to them, using my XML file (I didn't know if they're going to use that!). The client were very upset with it.
- goblin89 15y agoI think it should be ‘What happens when you accidentally swear at your users and properly apologize afterwards.’ It's only the latter that softens and makes swearing look fun—IMO even for (most) young techy people.
- pconf 15y agoThis is what happens when companies don't value QA and/or don't hire experienced systems administrators. Even among experienced sysadmins email list servers are special skill. No surprise when startups shoot themselves in the foot because the hiring director is a codehead who does not see the value in a sysadmin who cannot double as a dev or who is over 45 years old.