Fret not, friend. Think of what an giant a-hole Springer (and any other dumbass who thinks this is a good idea) is going to feel like in a few weeks after the entire blogosphere has picked him apart. He'll be spending sleepless nights drinking cheap bourbon and cursing his byline for years to come. And that will be pretty exhausting considering he'll be spending his days removing plastic forks from his underwatered lawn and scraping raw egg off the side of his duplex.

I'm content with this scenario. The only question, Scott, is...are you? If not, you better have DestinationCRM print a retraction mighty damn fast. You'll probably want to do some research this time around. You might even give your piece some serious thought before you publish it.

Looks like Scott has left the room. His e-mail address is not operable.

What the..? Cheap bourbin aside, I'm not so sure that Scott has done anything wrong. He (and it appears SmartReply) advocates opt-in and relevant messages that customers have asked to receive. Perhaps this blog advocates eliminating the ability of customers getting messages that they want...? It looks to me like James is out of touch with reality of where marketing is headed - it's a service, stupid. Nobody is going to tolerate SPAM anymore, and no wireless carrier is going to allow it to happen - they get a toll-tax each time a message is sent, so in their long term interest is the protection of this channel. Text messages are only going to work if they are 1) for entertainment, or 2) are for convenience.
I can't imagine that any searious marketer thinkgs that marketing is any good at selling, it's about service and customer experience. If a retraction is due, it's due from James. Next time, think before you open your pie hole; you're the one making marketers look bad.

Well aren't you all a bunch of drama queens! Lightn up, have a beer and relax a bit. Sheesh!

S-Dog Out

Ha ha - S-Dog, glad you stopped by. Looks like this post is #1 on Google for "Scott Springer". Oops :)

Don't worry - I have had plenty of beer in the last 9 months.

Jimmy - I read the dCRM article then did a search and found these postings. It looks like you missed the point in the article that Springer was fixed on - everything is opt-in and everything has value and there is no trickery.

But James, now anytime his family or colleagues punch his name into Google, they're greeted with the "evil jackass" top listing. That's pretty low, unless you're justing using this insult to try and drive you're own site traffic. But that seems to go against the integrity you proposed in attacking text spam. Do the right thing, James. Make momma proud.

Hey Scott's Mom (Disclosure: I changed the name on the comment from “your mom” – hey, if you aren’t going to leave an email address with your comment, you must not care all that much). Thanks for your opinion. I originally wrote this post all those months ago to express my feelings about the article - that's all. I eventually got a link from a popular site and so this post has gotten a bit of link juice behind it. Ranking for Scott’s name was a side effect of the post’s popularity, as was ranking for terms like “Smartreply” and “evil jackass.” If you think there’s traffic to be had with the keyword “Scott Springer”, you have another thing coming. If my goal were to get traffic to this blog, I wouldn’t do it by writing about Scott. And I’m not sure what speaking my mind has to do with integrity.

Either way, it seems pretty obvious that Scott - ahem, sorry - S-Dog, could care less about this post. So I wouldn‘t stress too much about the residual damage to Scott’s inner circle.