I am below contempt

I count myself very lucky in that I'm one of the few people in this world who can truthfully say they enjoy their job. I don't want to sound like I'm brown-nosing the boss or anything but one of the reasons Datapartners is such a good place to work is because we have fun.

We are still very hard working and diligent in our jobs. We are very professional when it comes to matters pertaining to the business and we genuinely strive to offer the best service possible.

Our recent Mailermatic newsletter plugging social networking was part of that service. We want to make our valued customers aware of important subjects that could benefit their business and we want to offer our help and assistance wherever possible. Social networking is also something that fits into our company ethos. It's new, it's different, it's exciting and, above all else, it's fun!

We had some great feedback from lots of people wanting to know more. Most people quite sensibly see the benefit and are interested in jumping on the band-wagon. Some are even asking us to do it for them. However, we did have one person say – in my best John Cleese impersonation – "I wish to register a complaint!"

Now, admittedly social networking is not for everybody but anyone who just dismisses it entirely from a business point of view is extremely short-sighted and I guarantee believes in Scientology and is a member of the Flat Earth Society. They probably don't even believe in evolution.

I did a check and the person in question was neither a customer of ours or a supplier. Just someone who voluntarily subscribed to our newsletter. Coupled with their assertion that they won't touch social networking with a barge-pole, I feel comfortable to share this with you. He started his email with the following:

“These sites that you say are the "place to be" are nothing but a wastes of both time, effort and energy. People have much better things to do in life that waste time using such facilities and you should be ashamed at promoting this sort of thing.”

OK well everyone is entitled to their opinion. I would argue that you only have to look at the fact that there are over 400 million people using Facebook and 70 million using Twitter. That's a huge potential networking reach for a business. I only have to look at the statistics from our own social networking campaigns to tell you that it definitely does work. I believe this is good reason to take it seriously. I also believe that people should have better things to do with their time than complain. I also think that writing complaints about something that in the grand scheme of things isn't that important is also a waste of time, effort and energy.

He then finished by stating “Any organisation that promotes such organisations is below contempt.”

Ignoring the repetitive use of nouns, I took the liberty of checking out his website and it turns out he's an “I.T. Consultant”. Enough said!