Vandaag was de eerste applicatie op basis van de LinkedIn API al beschikbaar: JobDASH. Een Adobe AIR applicatie die ik binnen 1 minuut had geinstalleerd en na 15 minuten alweer had verwijderd.
Tot zover niets bijzonders, tenslotte barst de wereld van volstrekt overbodige applicaties. Maar wat er daarna volgt is een stuk merkwaardiger.
Want na een aantal uren kreeg ik deze tweet onder ogen:
Een mij volstrekt onbekende persoon bedankt mij voor feedback waar ik geen weet van heb. Nou is mijn geheugen wat mottig, maar ik weet zeker dat ik hem niet ken.
Daarom vraag ik de man waar hij het over heeft. Waarop ik het volgende antwoord krijg:
Ik heb in die paar minuten dat ik JobDASH heb gebruikt via die applicatie ingelogd op mijn LinkedIn account. En vrijwel direct weer uitgelogd. Maar blijkbaar wordt aan de achterkant mijn LinkedIn account direct geharvested (met daarin mijn Twitter id) en word ik via Twitter lastig gevallen met gehengel om feedback.
Wat een uiterst merkwaardige gang van zaken! En voor mij een extra reden om nooit meer iets met JobDASH te maken willen hebben. Of met Workhound. Of met Twitterjobsearch. Want dat hoort blijkbaar allemaal onder hetzelfde spammy dak.
Marc,
I’m fine with a critique of our product. It is criticism that makes products better.
I take offense at the notion that there are any dark or spammy practices taking place. In your Tweet – you specifically put in the hash tag that identified our product. We track all tweets that mention our product to look for feedback and new product enhancements. I merely saw your tweet and sent a polite thank you and a request for more info on how we can make our product better.
The Tweet was from my personal twitter account and my bio information is plainly on that account. Since you tried the product and didn’t like it, I merely was looking for feedback to make the product better.
We don’t have bots that randomly track and send tweets. I saw that a potential customer was using our product and had a bad experience and I wanted to know how to help. Since I saw from the bio that you have on Twitter that you were an industry professional, I thought your feedback could be valuable.
Bill.
Wow Bill, you’re fast!
@Bill:
I gave CarveConsulting a very consise reply on JobDASH. Which can hardly qualify as feedback. In addition, your initial tweet is completely unclear as to what you were referring to. Hence my question as I suspected a bot.
I’m happy to hear your initial tweet was based on my reply to CarveConsulting and not to my very short look at JobDASH, with the login to LinkedIn and possible subsequent harvesting of my data for spamming. However, you might consider some privacy statements in context regarding this specific element.
Marc,
Thanks for your reply.
Again, our company has made significant investment to build tools to listen to our customers. Hence when you wrote ”useless tool, one of the many timesinks without value #jobdash” on a public forum in front of an audience of recruitment professionals (I realize that it was a reply to CarveConsulting but these replies go not just to CarveConsulting but to the individuals who follow both accounts, they also get picked up by dozens of search engines), I really wanted to figure out how we could make the product better.
I replied with my own name and personal email account and my tweet contained a link to all of my other tweets about JobDash and my Bio. My Tweet also immediately followed your Tweet.
For better or for worse, I took your quick review of our product as feedback. I am always excited to get negative feedback because it helps us make better products.
From your “useless” comment, we will try to figure out how to make the benefits clearer at the outset.
I am only writing this, now, because on your public blog you took the time to accuse my company of being spammers [per your tag] that uses shady practices [per the title of your post]. When, we used practices that are recommended by most social media consultants. Our company has been praised and has won many awards because we do these things, but in your case it didn’t work and I was trying to figure out how we don’t make that mistake again. We take privacy very seriously.
Bill.
@Bill:
Listening and engaging is definitely not something you need to learn, that much has become completely clear to me. Regarding links in tweets, the image of the first tweet is all I saw. I’m not partial to seeking out details behind a tweet carrying my name with an unclear message, I just ask the question to see if I’m dealing with a bot or something human(oid).
With respect to improving JobDASH, for me it’s yet another data/information aggregator and therefore adds no value to the use of information from a jobseeker perspective. So it’s about the application itself, not the implementation of it. I’m pretty sure we will differ in opinion and it is something you can come back and brag about if it turns into a huge succes. It wouldn’t be my first mistake…