I just had a rather unpleasant experience with a forum owner. I’m not going to name names here. If you know me, you’ll know that isn’t my style. I firmly believe that If I can’t say anything nice about a person, I shouldn’t say it. So if I’m writing something negative, I leave the person’s name out and I try to put a positive spin on it for my readers.
I am considering using one of those paid forum posting outfits to help me grow my forum. I’ve actually worked as a paid forum poster for forumsfirst.com and enjoyed the experience. I also believe in shopping around. I went looking at some of the other forum posting providers and pretended that I was looking for a job as a forum poster. I believe that if a company treats its employees right, then they’ll treat me right as a client. I also believe that if a company is nasty to the employees then I will get bad service. So I applied at this one company and apparently they are a real stickler about people applying for the forum using the same username they use somewhere else. I must have missed it in the terms of service using the smallest font in the world… So the forum owner gets all snippy with me about this huge infraction I made with the username and says I blew any chances of working there because I made that one mistake. The forum owner didn’t even give me the chance to correct the mistake and was consistently rude during the whole exchange. I told the owner that they lost a potential client because of the bad attitude they exhibited and they responded by banning me from the forum. OOOH! I am so hurt!
Now I bet you are wondering what the moral of this rant is. The moral is this: Be polite to everyone you encounter. This includes job seekers, salespeople, and telemarketers. You never know who is a potential client. You never know who has an audience of 5000+ people that they can share their negative experience with. Remember we are in the age of social media where anyone can ruin a company with a few keystrokes. Just be nice!
About deannatroupe
DeAnna Troupe is a small business coach and a freelance writer. She helps small business owners with their social media strategy. In her free time she likes to spend time with her family. She enjoys watching basketball and American football, crocheting, reading, writing, singing, and playing cards.
That’s so true. But rudeness is just uncalled for in any walk of life.
The bad thing about being rude online is that most of the information about the experience is visible forever. So, when people search for you (as the person who has been rude), they will often find these posts. A key reason to not do business.
Thom Lancaster´s last [type] ..Three Summer Productivity Secrets
Very good point Thom! That’s something that people tend to forget.