untyping: Corporate Blanding

« Custom Dispatchers in the PLT Scheme Web Server | Main | Announcing: Delirium »

December 07, 2007

Corporate Blanding

Amusing interaction on the last.fm forums. Concerning bugs in the current last.fm client on Leopard, a member of staff writes:

We're aware of there being a fuckload of problems concerning the client and Leopard. Fear not, for work shall be focused on ironing these bugs out in the coming days.

Which brings the following customer responses:

Is this what passes for professionalism on Web 2.0?

and

Paying or not, we're customers, and we deserve to be treaded with some professionalism.

As a testament to how poorly that language can be received, just witness how this support thread has degraded since the post.

Seeing this, I'm now a FORMER last.fm customer. While one customer may not matter in the short term, every customer does count to a healthy business.

The same last.fm staff member then makes things just a little bit worse with the following rather sarcastic apology:

I hereby apologise to the tiny fraction of the 5% of our userbase who are Mac users for offending them by the use of the word “fuckload.” We'll try and be more corporate and sterile in future.

To be fair there were at least as many posts from people who didn't find the language offensive, or even liked it. But the whole mess could have been avoided by simply using, say, “shedload” in the original post, which would have kept the character of the post without causing offense. It pays to remember that on the big old Internet not everyone shares the same values.

Posted by Noel at December 7, 2007 10:32 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.untyped.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/126

Comments

I’m inclined to disagree. It is often more commercially effective to polarize opinion. Have people either love or hate your product, rather than not make a strong impression. You’re guaranteed to have the support of the ones who love you, and that’s better than a larger customer base who are constantly looking around for something with a couple more features.

Using language that’s outside of what would be expected from a corporation has this same effect. Sure, there are some who are offended, but others will take that message and say, “See, this is why I love these guys. They’re not afraid to speak their minds, and no one’s censoring their stuff.” And last.fm is largely targeting young-and-hip, which is a crowd generally less likely to take offense to such language, I would think.

Which also means, “know your market.” That post would have polarized the customers with a much larger portion in the “offended” category had they been selling professional legal software, and that would have been a bad move.

Posted by: Greg Pfeil at December 7, 2007 04:52 PM

> It pays to remember that on the big old Internet not everyone shares the same values. Only if you're trying not to lose every last customer. As a small business owner, there's a non-trivial percentage of customers I'm happy be rid of; if I could do it with "fuckload" alone, I damn sure would. Was it Verizon (or some other huge US Cell carrier) that decided to terminate their PITA customers? Last I heard, they couldn't have been happier. And to the quoted poster who said they had a right to be treated with professionalism, paying or not... I'd like to see where that right is enumerated, exactly. That one thinks he DESERVES something doesn't translate into a right for that thing.

Posted by: Michael Campbell at December 7, 2007 06:05 PM

Greg and Michael: I agree that a corporation with character is preferrable to blandness, but I don't think the use of the word fuckload significantly contributes to this character when there are so many good alternatives available (shedload, boatload, and truckload are all in common use around these parts). In this case the whole issue could have been avoided by simply using one of these alternate words, which would have maintained the same character to the post and not have offended anyone. Seems like a better solution to me. I believe the developer's sarcastic apology is far worse than his original post that caused the issue. The original posting is a mistake, but the apology is an unnecessary insult to those who were offended.

Posted by: Noel at December 8, 2007 01:47 PM

You're looking at this the wrong way. Being offended is a right too -- a lot of people (a disproportionate number of whom seem to spend all their time on the internet) simply love taking offence. Nothing you or I can do will stop them, because if it's not the venerable anglo-saxon monosyllables that offend them, it's the mealy-mouthed corporate blandness. They like taking offense. Why deny them their fun? And it's not like they ever do much, apart from being offended, so it makes sense to give them their little buzz and then send them packing. I can think of a fuckload of reasons.

Posted by: Eric TF Bat at December 27, 2007 10:02 PM