You’ve clearly made a mistake in your recent decision to promote Nathan Schorr to be your Business Development Manager. He would appear to be proposing unethical practices to promote your company. This is already turning into bad buzz for you, as my friend and former co-worker, Jason Calacanis, has already launched a bit of an investigative study into PR firms attempting to game Digg. Nathan Schorr has approached several of our Navigators who used to be top Diggers offering them deals to falsely promote their stories. Here’s one such email which is the same one that Jason has posted on his site:
My name is Nathan Schorr and I have been recently promoted as the Business Development Manager at JetNumbers Inc. Our company sells virtual telephone numbers. My job is to get people interested in our site, but my problem is that I have not had any success. While searching the web for possible business partners, I started to read about Digg and its popularity…that’s where you come into play.
Given the fact that you are the number 8 user at the website, I am contacting you to see if I can somehow recruit you to start getting the word out about our service.
Please check us out, see what you think and get back to me.
Regards,
Nathan Schorr
Business Development Manager
JetNumbers Inc.
www –dot- jetnumbers –dot- com
I’m not sure if you are aware of the implications of this, but as both Digg and Netscape—and for that matter, most social news sites—are framed on the idea of Democracy, Mr. Schorr’s attempt to buy off the votes and influence of some of the top members of these sites is somewhat analogous to someone trying to buy off a Senator or House Member’s votes or perhaps electoral college votes.
If Mr. Schorr’s actions were not known to you, I hope that you find out about them and take action against them before they further tarnish your company’s name. If you did know about them, I advise that you retract this approach and seriously rethink your strategy, before it destroys your reputation beyond repair.
Please know that we will be banning your site and any other sites known to work with you from ever being able to submit stories to Netscape. I hope that the Internet community as a whole joins us in this endeavor. You may need us and our clicks, but we do not need you and your dishonest practices.
Sincerely,
C.K. Sample III
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