I’ve Lost My Job To A Space Hopper
I’m off on another trip to chilly Holland tomorrow (though it won’t be quite as cold as it has been) for more Valentine’s related floweriness. So I had a lot to finish up this evening and I was last to leave the office. As I went to lock up, something sitting on the corner of my desk caught my eye. It was a Christmas present from my mother; a Space Hopper. I must admit that as it has sat on my desk over recent weeks I’ve occasionally wondered why my mother (Jackie) bought me, her 33 year old son, a present designed for, erm, children.
But then I remembered that Jackie, also our head of CS and the voice at the end of the telephone, is familiar with my strategic planning ability and the level of my management expertise. She clearly realised that on my occasional trips to Holland, the Space Hopper would make more than adequate replacement for me and would fill my shoes with ease. So, I duly inflated it and installed it in my chair, ready to take over my duties in my absence.
Here is the sight that will greet Sam, Stan and Adarsh tomorrow morning as they walk into the office. Hopefully it’ll raise a laugh to start their day off. Either that or they’ll think I’ve gone totally insane and / or become as cringeworthy as David Brent. Or maybe they won’t even notice the difference.
My biggest concern is that the Space Hopper might do a better job than me and I’ll get made redundant. :-|
PS And for those that are wondering, no, I haven’t touched a drop!
Filed under: General, Valentine's Day on January 21st, 2009 | 2 Comments »
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As trailed a little while ago in our 
Recently 
Getting hitched in the chilly months of winter doesn’t mean that you need to compromise on your winter 
Yesterday was a busy day for anti-fraud newsflow plus some good old fashioned 
There’s no doubt that education is key in battling web spam and other forms of online fraud and 
Understandably, reputable online businesses recognise the challenge of building trust and at Arena we work very hard to address potential trust concerns of visitors, such as payment methods and checkout integrity, site security, quality / value / freshness of product, and data protection and privacy policies. After all, if we’re asking customers to hand over their money without ever having met us face to face, then they will need to be convinced that we are who we say we are and that we’ll deliver on our promises. We try as much as we can to be clear and transparent about what we do (posting to our blog regularly is part of that…I hope it’s clear that this post isn’t being written by a scammer in Eastern Europe!). The key is not to slip up as, as they say, “trust is hard to win and very easy to lose”. Once you have it, do your very best to hold on to it.
It’s therefore incredibly frustrating when a lot of hard work is potentially undone by a company that really should know better – 
Now, I don’t know what you think, but if I received an email like that from my firewall supplier, I’d look very hard at any future communications from Arena and quite possibly unsubscribe immediately. After all, MessageLabs are a $700m company so they must be right, yeah? Surely, they wouldn’t send out an email that slams a genuine business’s legitimate, opt-in marketing activity so thunderously by mistake? Big boys like MessageLabs are bound to have complicated checks and balances in place to avoid accidentally torpedoing the legitimate marketing efforts of other organisations. A web security firm in particular would understand the importance of online reputation and the hard work that goes into building trust. And in any case, Arena has been sending regular marketing emails every other week for over two years, so no doubt MessageLabs would be able to use characteristics of our mail sends, such as previous send frequency, an unchanged IP address, subject lines etc etc to double check the validity of the send.
10/10 for being a pushy sales rep but frankly this mail was not terribly well received as you can imagine. You wouldn’t want this guy consoling you if you broke up with your partner. “I’m afraid you’ve been dumped but I’m a pimp – have you considered paying for sex?”. You’d then be even more upset when you found out that it was this guy that had caused the break up with your partner in the first place.
The frustrating thing about this is that MessageLabs has several million installed users in the UK, particularly in big, wealthy organisations, such as the government and banks etc. These are obviously valuable potential customers and exactly the kind of people we’d love to retain. Unfortunately we have no way of knowing how many such customers have now had their hard won trust in Arena dented or destroyed by MessageLabs’ misdiagnosis and there is no real way for us to fix this (bar writing this cathartic blog post!). The chap at MessageLabs said “Sorry” but it’s not going to make any difference. It’s clearly no coincidence that this email performed far worse than any other we’ve ever sent; it can realistically only be down to our MessageLabs mishap.
Dr. Dave Chaffey, is the Director and lead consultant for 
The biggest challenge for all online marketers has to be gaining and keeping attention, what the academics call “customer engagement”. Despite the Google monopoly, the search engines are still great for gaining attention for businesses that make the effort to understand the details of best practice.
