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Internet
Marketing Tip of the Month
Beware the Third Voice
August, 1999
Your
website is your canvas to tell the story of your product or service directly to
customers, prospects, and business partners, right? Nobody else can express
their opinions on your website, unless you've invited them to do so using a
discussion forum or guestbook, right? Well, that may no longer be true.
Introducing Third Voice.
Third
Voice is a system that lets you add popup messages to any website. Any other web
surfer who has downloaded the free Third Voice software (http://www.thirdvoice.com)
can also read your messages when visiting the site. The intent: to turn the web
into a free exchange of ideas and opinions, a collaborative tool for workgroups,
or a personal reminder service, rather than the one-way corporate PR vehicle it
usually is. Recent Third Voice missives on the Microsoft website include:
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Microsoft
innovate?
by jamesp
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Linux
is better
by Unholy
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Pardon
me, but when did MS innovate anything? Even MSDOS was poached (QDOS, if
I remember correctly) and their few half-decent products, such as
Autoroute, were obtained by buying the company that created them...
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All
of you that have or know someone getting windows, DON'T. Get linux, it's
much better
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Third
Voice is receiving a great deal of press attention, most recently profiled in
Fortune magazine as one of the "Cool Companies" for 1999. So, how
exactly is Third Voice a threat to your Internet marketing campaign?
We
considered it unlikely that any projects we work with would be subject to a
Third Voice message…until we found one! The website for Flamingo Surprise (http://www.flamingosurprise.com)
was subject to a message from a much smaller direct competitor that invited web
surfers to visit the competitor's site instead. Microsoft's reputation can
withstand the assault, we would imagine, but for a company using the Net to
build a reputation and grow a business, a negative Third Voice message can be
damaging.
What
can you do to protect your site and your reputation?
The
most important step is to get educated. Download Third Voice (works only with
Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser for now) and visit your site and other
important sites in your industry to see if Third Voice users are active. Check
these sites regularly.
If
you see unwanted messages, or want to inoculate your site from future messages,
there may be some recourse. We are consulting with a group of independent
technologists (okay, hackers) and have implemented countermeasures that render
Third Voice messages unreadable. We can now disable messages viewed with the
current version of Third Voice (beta 2), and we will continue to follow future
versions.
Contact
Dynamics Online to have your site reviewed for or
protected from unwanted Third Voice messages.
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