Fuck that shit! We've spent a long time online realizing that in a web environment, it's possible to promote ourselves without spreading the low-level negativity associated with older advertising methods. This is the Internet! Gaining lots of publicity for yourself can be achieved with good, happy, fun things! The advantage of giving everybody a voice is that now you don't have to contact everybody yourself. You can work on making something so good their friends contact them for you.

If you think cold calling is the most effective tool you've got when you're sitting in front of a computer, look just a smidge deeper. I think the point of the blog post was dead-on—if you're out to directly establish relationships with people, then establish them without making it a business. You'll find a way to mention the product to them without it deliberately being a sales pitch.

It was a friken cold call and it worked. You went through the trouble to blog about it.

I don't see how it worked. He blogged about it without mentioning the name of the product. When I read this, I don't feel any thoughts about the product he was pitched because I don't know what the product was. If the goal was to get promotion, it failed utterly.

I bet you good money you wont forget the company or its product for the next few years though, and every time you see a similar product you can't help but compare them.

I hear this a lot on Hacker News and related fori: People who think that just because you have a product in your mind, it's good advertising. I heard it a lot in particular with the weird Microsoft ads. Well, in the advertising world, that's bogus. People knowing your name does not translate to sales unless they know your name in the right context. Apple's 1984 ad is the one they teach for this reason: People discussed it the say after it aired, asking themselves what Macintosh was, what the ad meant, and so they came to the conclusion collectively that Macintosh was something big and new. It's an ad that made a positive spin. But when I see a weird, messed-up ad that I don't understand, or when somebody goes out of their way to mention their product to me, the name sticks around but there's no positive signifier to it. I'm not willing to buy a product just because I recognize their ad. There's got to be something that convinces me it's maybe worth buying.

So in this case, perhaps the guy will remember the product name—though I seriously doubt that. You underestimate our ability to block things out that we don't want to hear. I've received a dozen emails from people that wanted me to advertise them on my blog, and I don't remember a single product name. If he does remember it, though, that doesn't necessarily brainwash him. He won't see competing products and say, "Nope, can't think about this, I have another name in mind." Rather, he'll ask logical, uninfluenced questions, like "Do I need this at all? Why would I get this rather than that?" If there's any bias now, I'd say it's negative—"Well, this guy didn't think a good promotion would be cold calling. Looks like he's not so much a desperate fucker." (That would be my reaction, though to be fair I'm a mean person so it might be a bit over-the-top.)

When business people look at everything as a potential sale, they risk wasting a lot of time making a few sales. That's a bad way to do business. Much smarter to figure out how to do the most with a little effort—and friending somebody on Facebook is usually just a bit too much effort to close a sale, especially if you need a thousand sales a month to break even.