Before You Ask Me For a Favour, Make Sure You Know My Name!
Over the last few weeks I have grown to love StumbleUpon and Sphinn and I actively use them both and have a few friends in both networks. StumbleUpon has a feature that allows you to send a page to your friends along with a short message. Increasingly I’m being sent to a Sphinn story page and being asked to vote on the story submitted there.
First of all I dislike begging, it feels somewhat cheap. Still, I don’t get requests all that often so I usually check them out and vote up the story if I like it. However today brought an interesting request when I clicked on the icon in my Stumble toolbar:
Look at the picture, notice anything odd about it?
Who the heck is CLAIRE? Not me, my name is Caroline! Because I’m nice, I have blanked out the avatar and the name of the offender, and I doubt he’ll ever know because I can only assume he doesn’t read this blog or how could he think my name is Claire??
I can see how this happened… My StumbleUpon username is “cmiddlebrook” (so is my Sphinn one) and when you want to send a page to your friends you select them from a drop-down list showing their avatar and their username. So if he couldn’t remember my name, he would have had to spend at least 5 seconds looking for it, which is obviously far too much for this busy guy!
Now this post is not about the ethics of begging for Social media votes, if that became abused I would simply remove that person as a friend. It’s about common courtesy and not destroying your newly formed online relationships right at the start. If you are going to take the time out to ask for a favor from somebody, it is just polite to at least be sure that you know their name. It’s one thing to misspell a name, but to get it wrong completely is another.
However, could be worse. My other half’s grandmother used to call me Geraldine! - But she was senile!
Oh, and No, I didn’t Spinn the story, in case you wondered I didn’t even look at it.
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Stumble it!
Mohsin
October 16, 2007
Well, Geraldine..oh… I mean Claire..err.. sorry I want to say Caroline, I swear it wasn’t I who sent you the Sphinn request :p
If that guy reads your blog (though I doubt it for the same reason you do) he must have learned his lesson.