RSInteract Comment Spam
The catalyst of this post was one Christian Smyth (apparently the CEO of ICS) who thought that a good way to promote the fact that his company's product, RSInteract, had won an award recently would be to post the entire press release text in the comments of a post I wrote recently (I have since removed the comment text). A day later I gained yet another piece of comment spam thanks to another, this time anonymous, ICS employee trying to promote an upcoming seminar. Didn't want to put your name to it this time, Christian?
Hey ICS, if you want to use my blog to promote your products & services wouldn't it be polite to ask me first? My email address is easy to find. Be warned that your comments are only going to be deleted soon after they arrive.
Admittedly I am adding to the promotion of this product by way of this post, but I felt like having a bit of a rant. Have any other BI bloggers out there had their comments defaced by ICS in this way recently?
UPDATE: Just received a comment on this post from Huzmah Ahmed, the head of marketing at ICS.
Thanks for the comment, Huzmah. Contacting bloggers directly is not really that hard. Many have their email addresses posted somewhere on their blogs - I do. If you can't find an email address, Google is a good start. BI bloggers in particular would almost certainly be well aware of RSInteract. We're all in the BI game so the chances of our contact details (or someone we work with) being somewhere in the ICS system may also be quite high.
2 comments:
I got one of these too Nick, but it was attached to a post from a few months ago. For some reason the delete command did not work, so I have just ignored it.
Dear Nick,
I head up marketing at ICS- the authors of RSinteract. Firstly I would like to explain why we posted the press release information. We thought it would be a great way to notify BI specialists (like you) of the entry of our new product- which yes has won an award recently- surely you would want to know about this new tool? We believe that it is extremely important to make you aware of new tools that build on the MS BI stack (SSRS). Secondly, I would like to apologise to you and other blog authors if you feel we have offended you and taken undue advantage of your sites. We are new to the etiquettes of posting comments on blogs especially when there is no other way to contact some blog authors. I welcome any advice (offline if you prefer) that will help us to avoid making future faux pas’. Thank you.
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