How to Avoid Irreparably Destroying Your Reputation Before You Even Have One

This reminds me of why Color flopped. When people hear you've raised a titanic sum of money prelaunch, especially from a VC firm like Sequoia, the expectations for your product are exponentially higher than if you raise a decent A round from angels and small VC firms. Color was a base hit when everyone expected a grand slam. From that moment on, they face an overwhelmingly tough task convincing people their first impressions were wrong.

From their Twitter stream:

> The most epic website launch of all time... The Facebook Competitor may reign supreme,,,, uh oh Zuckerberg

",,,,"? Why do people struggle with their language so much? I mean, all you need to do is get a sentence right, and I'm guessing they'd seen an ellipsis before.

It's ironic that the site is now struggling because of all the traffic it's getting ;)

And guess what, they're using Facebook Connect https://twitter.com/#!/kevinrose/statuses/80809855933353984

I guess there's another lesson here - don't let anyone you don't know do promotional work on your behalf. "Anthony" apparently let someone do some promotional efforts for socialpog thinking "what harm can it do?" and then found out it can do a lot of harm. He probably spent money with for that promotional effort too, which makes this all the more tragic.

everything is dead. the digg link is dead. the site http://www.socialpog.com is giving an error. the linked video is dead.

at the bottom of the page (the blog design guy link) the site owner appears, apologising. it seems like comments are from about 6 hours ago.

I never really understood why people lie about their site in order to gain users. I mean, you can't fool them for very long, so your opportunity for whatever you plan is has to be very quick.

The only thing I can think is that they expect to earn a lot of money real quick to help fund development... But I really can't see that working.

This is a reason why (to some extent) you should let users dictate your marketing for you. What I mean by that is to avoid touting yourself as this mega awesome site and just sort of go with the flow. Your users, if they exist, will take care of getting the word out. Doing things like this is cheap and not representative of a company that's interested in their own success. Also, the whole "Facebook" killer thing? Why has it become common practice for new social networks to have to "kill" their competitors? If they were truly intelligent, they'd develop some feature as the core of their service that Facebook lacks and then put that at the forefront. This, though, isn't helpful and doesn't draw any interest toward the product.

I run a web BBS, and we had to deal with my competitor spamming imageboards. It didn't do him much good (because he's finally gone), but he gained infamy because of the incident, thus ruining his real life and causing him much debt.

Hey,

This is "Anthony". Lesson learned absolutely. Not a whole lot to say except for gigantic mistake on my part. Let this be a lesson to all new webmasters. Shortcuts as JD has written are bad ideas. Respect is earned, and I in know way deserve it.

The article JD wrote was absolutely amazing. While reading I was just shaking my head at my self.

HUH! I never think in that way!