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Just three hours after I posted my rant on Citysearch spam I got a new message from the Angie Eckford. You might think there was an apology or at least a word “sorry”…

So did I. Boy, were we both wrong!

Through 157 words of the reply (not counting signature and subject) there was not a single use of words “sorry”, “apology” or “regret”. What was there, though, are explanation on what went wrong (okay, I don’t know how to use Mail Merge too, but I don’t use it as an excuse), what that person was trying to do (send out a promotion to as many people as possible) and accusations that my previous post made “the entire company tuned into your message you placed online and negative comment about me“.

At least someone listened this time.

Since the first post went public I feel the need to reply here, on this blog as well. I do hope this won’t happen again - neither to me, nor to other people who might have been interested in Citysearch services. After all, CItysearch service seem to be popular and someone somewhere is probably very happy using it.

We have learned our lessons here - mine are “think twice before doing business with Citysearch” and “don’t use your main e-mail even with companies that look big”.

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• Spam From CitySearch (October 17, 2008): It's quite interesting how some people take their jobs as a carte blanche to do pretty much anything they want. Some time ago while doing a marketing research for our clients for web development, I got in touch with Citysearch. Client and I were thinking of trying some of their services but it turned out [...]
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It’s quite interesting how some people take their jobs as a carte blanche to do pretty much anything they want. Some time ago while doing a marketing research for our clients for web development, I got in touch with Citysearch. Client and I were thinking of trying some of their services but it turned out my other client was already using them and was less then happy. I, for one, thought that it’s the case of “marketing - you’re doing it wrong”, but that’s not the point of this post.

While on the phone with CitySearch sales agent, I was really pushed hard to purchase their services. I actually ran out of polite words to decline - even though I stated the honest reason that we couldn’t take any more clients at that moment. Sales rep kept pushing me almost to the point when I was ready to hang up on her. But - we worked it out, so I hoped it’s over.

I was wrong.

Recently, starting about a month ago, I started getting correspondence from Angie Eckford, the city search rep of some sort. Of course all the e-mails looked personalized, but how personalized can a message be given the subject is something along with “Business Owners Receive 50% off Direct Connections to Qualified Customers” - you can guess all by yourself. To me there’s nothing personal, SpamAssassin on my servers kills plenty of those in a day. Plus the regular Viagra stuff - you know.

Given that there’s a direct phone, personal e-mail and a thin memory that I talked to some human being from that company I replied with the question of “When did I double opted-in into this spam list?”. The reponse was just what I thought it would be: it’s not a spam list, it’s a personal message.

Yeah, right. Viagra guys also sending me personal messages. You know, those that start with “%FIRST_NAME% %LAST_NAME%, you will be suprised!“.

Politely, I replied with “Please, don’t do that again.” - only to get one more piece of citysearch junk in my inbox.

Sure, Citysearch works for some people, most likely - restaurants, local places to go and so on. But I’d rather spend some extra hours working out Google AdWords campaigns to target my clients’ markets, than be a subject of such a dishonest treatment by CitySearch representatives.

Oh, and did you know that cost per click is about ten times cheaper in Google AdWords than in Citysearch campaings?

You might also be interested in reading this:

• Spam From Citysearch (continued) (October 17, 2008): Just three hours after I posted my rant on Citysearch spam I got a new message from the Angie Eckford. You might think there was an apology or at least a word "sorry"... So did I. Boy, were we both wrong! Through 157 words of the reply (not counting signature and subject) there was not a single [...]
• Twitter, twitter, little star… (August 21, 2007): Last week I have discovered a new and innovative way people will produce doorways for their black hat SEO techniques. It's called Twitter and it's some sort of a guestbook, where posting is available via number of widgets, including direct post from IM. Create a bunch of twitter pages (the only manual part of the [...]
• Spam… in apologetic way (August 17, 2007): I received this message (sent from some galinagirll at tesrghft8077@inbox.ru)e-mail through the contact form on one of our sites. It's hilarious: Subject: nice site Message: hello , you have a very nice site, but Im hired to leave advertising comments on sites, sorry i hate to do it but i have to . If you dont like advertising [...]
• Spam… a LOT! (March 8, 2006): One of my current clients - russian-speaking radio station GenerationNX.com are preparing to move to a newer, faster server. One of the problems they are facing is e-mail migration. For certain obvious reasons I want them to have a copy of all archived e-mails that they have stored on the server. They're using plain old [...]