Friday, September 10, 2004

Talk Nowt

Good to see that standards are as high as ever at my former employers Edelman. The Orange team there were forced to send out the following correction after a defective press release:

Further to the Orange release that was sent out this morning, we wish to point out that the header for some of you read as ‘TALK NOWT’, when it should have read ‘TALK NOW’.

The extra ‘T’ appeared due to the trademark ™ sign, not being able to appear in it’s true form when using applications such as Lotus notes.

Rule one of sending out email communications to the media is doing it plain text. This reduces the size of the journalist's email box, which is good netiquette and makes the email universally readable. Hell, I check my home email account on my Nokia phone when I am on the move.

Its a good job that this mistake was not done on the one million GBP plus Microsoft account that Edelman currently holds. The bit I cannot believe is that after they messed up, they had the gall to blame the whole lot on the journalists email application; rather than being an adult about it. I guess its the same lame logic that has Microsoft calling viruses such as Blaster that affect only the Windows platform 'internet' viruses.

It makes me wonder who are the 'specialists' heading up the technology practice and where have the smarts gone?

Incidentially browsing the Edelman website on my Mac using both Safari and Mozilla Firefox brings up the following warning:

"This site has been optimized for all browsers and platforms other than Netscape 6.x on Mac OS. For the best user experience please use Netscape Navigator 4.x or 7.x or Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 or later."

Maximum kudos to Independent technology scribe Charles Arthur (you can read his blog entry here).