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myOtaku.com: Adam


Tuesday, December 6, 2005


You're Nothing, Nothing Without Ethics
I'm really proud of our team's level of ethics. I honestly believe that an organization simply cannot succeed unless it holds itself to the highest ethical standards.

Recently, we received two emails from different people suggesting a news story to run on the site.

The first email was standard business fare from someone with the company featured in the story. This was well and good. We receive lots of these.

The second email, however, was from the same person pretending to be one of our normal visitors! (We log all the technical details of people who use our contact form.)

How did he pretend?

He used a free email account with an anime-esque name. Then he made something like 85 spelling/grammar mistakes in the email. He also put a lot of "^_^"

I was obviously appalled. Not only was he lying to manipulate our perception of what our audience wanted to hear, he even insulted our audience's intelligence with the # of spelling/grammar mistakes.

(Not to mention my intelligence, that I wouldn't notice.)

Even worse, the company he represented is well-respected and huge in the anime world.

I thought about running a big feature on this on theOtaku.com. I thought about blocking all news items about said company until I received an apology. I was pretty heated.

However, Justin talked me out of it. He told me that two wrongs didn't make a right and that we should take a higher road.

I'm so proud of the ethics on board.

I'm blogging about the incident without mentioning any names. I also sent a stern email to the company that they shouldn't engage in this kind of behavior.

I just hope it gets read.

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