This is at best meaningless noise and at worst deliberately obscure.

I wonder how much better people would feel if it was immediately obvious what this was about?

On the other hand I would have thought it to be rather obvious from the start that such a competition idea would not be a wise decision. The fact you wanted it re-tweeted as much as possible makes it virtually the same as chain emails that fill my spam box (and I would have thought yours).

Maybe more consideration should be done in the future – for a company such as Carsonified who I view as very much on the front row of internet understanding these sort of things shouldn’t really be occurring.

I’m just about to announce a competition associated to a 7-part blog series, and was considering asking Twitter followers to re-tweet – but only once. A condition of entry was to tweet something similar to “I just read xyz blog series. Check it out and enter the comp. Cool prizes” – that kinda thing.

We think the blog series itself will be really beneficial to our niche, and the competition was added to get the word out about the series and to hopefully boost our profile a little.

In this context, will we be stepping on toes?

@George – Love that While loop.

@AJ – Thanks again for the support – I appreciate you.

@Brian

“Too many people are too afraid to actually see the true colours of Carsonified”

First – When you comment, please link up your site and use your last name. If you’re going to take a shot at our company, please identify yourself.

Second – Please tell me what you’re referring to in regards to our “true colours”. If you’re talking about the fact we’re a company and we need to make a profit then I’ve never hid that fact. If it’s something else, please let everyone know what you’re talking about so we can have a proper discussion.

“I’m not suggesting their in anyway evil just they ain’t as good as they’d like you to think they are.”

-Brian

a) What the hell are you talking about?
b) How from a Twitter competition gone wrong (oh, and by the way Ryan apologized for that, if you scroll up a bit you might see that), can anyone possibly extrapolate out to this nebulous statement that Carsonified is not “as good as they’d like you to think they are”?

I mean seriously, if you are going to post a dictum on a person/company’s character like that please, for the love of God, be clear. Don’t hide behind some ambiguous and anonymous jab because it forces any half-witted person to assume that you actually reached this idea that Ryan and/or Carsonified is not a good company (or not a good enough company), that you have measured their moral compass as contrived somehow because THEY POSTED AN OFF BEAT TWITTER CONTEST ONE DAY!

Surely, that can’t be the case, so what is it? Did Ryan steal your lunch money when you were a kid? Did the Carsonified team steal your pet bunny?

He made a mistake and almost immediately “manned up” and apologized, which is much more than I have come to expect from the vast majority of business people I meet. Most people would just ignore “the haters”, Carsonified invites them to debate and in the midst of an onslaught, course corrects immediately, and comes out and apologizing, stipulating the reasons why they were wrong. Come on, you have to have a modicum of respect for that.

That is a perfectly clear message of apology and good enough for me. Lesson learned. I can’t see the point in making ‘the apology’ an issue. What next, a thread about the apology for ‘the apology’?

while(SomePeopleAreNeverSatisfied==true)
{
apologise();
SomePeopleAreNeverSatisfied==true;
}

Adversity as painful as it sometimes feels, is a valuable teacher. Never stop learning. Always be fair, humble and, above all, honest …just as you are today! Great job, son! I am so very proud of you as a man of integrity, a wonderful husband and father and, especially, as a man of unwavering integrity.

You are indeed, Ryan, a man of Steel and Velvet.

I love you, Dad

:-)

But really, this is straying way off-topic. If others are pleased to have had an apology of any sort then I guess that’s all they needed. For myself, I take a little more convincing.

Very harsh! Perhaps you have a very pure apology-filter, but I think Ryan’s post comes across as pretty genuine and heartfelt, and it seems most of us do.

Props to Ryan for his honest analysis.

Here’s my issue. Someone is actually open enough to talk about contracts with employees, selling price of their app, business policies, etc. that person (aka:Ryan) is giving us an inside look at the inner workings of Carsonified. I don’t think people have to take such low blows. I you disagree then fine, but lets not get petty and say that a man’s apology was not sincere or his integrity is lacking.

I don’t think Carson was wrong in this instance and that is why I am defending him. The day I do disagree that is what I will do – Disagree not make attacks his character and intentions.

Carsonified definition = good. :)

I fail to see how this was a bad move. It was a good idea to spread the contest and it only affects you if someone you’re following retweets it. If they do and you think they’re an idiot for doing it – then unfollow them. If you don’t agree with Carsonified posting that then unfollow them too. I don’t think this ruins Twitter. You choose who you follow. Otherwise, it doesn’t impact you so why do you care so much? You can’t punish someone for pulling out an idea because someone in the future might misuse it (re: large companies trying to do the same).

There are obviously a lot of companies using Twitter right now and many people have no problem with this. No one can claim Twitter is for non-commercial use and I hate to break it to you all, but when something is ONLINE it’s opened up for anyone to use – however they choose. That’s part of how the ol’ internet and social apps work.

Ben if you didn’t like the apology, close the web page and have a beer, life is too short!

I’m not quite sure how my mentioning that the door swings both ways with regards to attention on twitter is in any way a threat, or indeed childish, but if that’s how you interpret it — so be it. My comments about how it seems Ryan is out of touch with the social web aren’t based merely on this incident, however. This is just the latest in a series of gaffes. I’m thinking about that article offering advice on how to operate a recession-proof business days after making staff redundant in particular. Episodes like this undermine the reputation of Carsonified.

I appreciate that a lot of people get a lot of value out of Carsonified’s conferences, and the company has probably inspired a lot of people to do great things. That shouldn’t blind us into mindlessly defending everything they do. Holding people to good values is what keeps them on the straight and narrow and doing good things.

I think the main problem is Twitter for many is like email or PM – in that the messages arrive on their computers through clients. This is different to blogs because people usually visit blogs via a web browser and then proceed to skim past topics they aren’t interested in.

If some of your friends who you enjoy reading about send out a message like that, it’s not really an option to stop following them because you can no longer see what they are saying. If it happened to me, I would set up a filter on TweetDeck or something similar to attempt to block the messages.

Nice to see the above blog post though. :)

I understand your concerns about noise vs signal which could be a potential “Twitter killer”. Though the guys between the app can easily track someone who sends x times the same tweet – there’s barely no danger you started to kill Twitter :)

And one more thing how is writing an apology blog evasive? Well thanks Ryan for your openness and apology.

“I’m more and more convinced that you just don’t get what it is that makes the social web work, based on what you’ve written here.” And now you are trying to say that Ryan and the Carsonified team “don’t understand the social web”. The Carsonified team exemplify social web daily by being open and honest and sharing their knowledge with us. You apparently don’t appreciate what they do, but there are many of us out here that do. So you can have your personal opinions about whether the Twitter idea was good or bad, however that does not mean that you should be attacking someone’s motives or personal character (especially when they admit that the Twitter idea wasn’t that great).

with Hold on so you tell me how does the social web work?

In this case, Ryan tried something, then thought better about it – fairplay I say, we all make mistakes and from them we get experience and learn. Those that keep giving Carsonified a hard time can vote with their fingers – use the unfollow button.

Nicely put, I completely agree I have voted with my finger and started following Ryan again.

David