Bumping your message to the top
 It's called a bump. It's used by marketers who want their message, promoting whatever service or product they've decided to target a discussion forum with, to appear at the top of the tree.
It usually starts like this...
Hi !
Do you know that many organizations are successfully using intelligent virtual agents today to improve their sales and customer service and reduce costs?
followed by the hard sell.
Of course nothing happens, no one replies or discusses the topic because there isn't anything to discuss. So it sits there for a couple of days, being ignored. Time to raise it to the top.
So the poster follows up with their own reply....
Know how Virtual Agents helps promoting new products.
Again it doesn't add any value to the conversation, but the message has appeared at the top of the discussions list (usually organised by "latest activity" - regardless of how meaningful). If the poster is lucky they might even get included in the daily "latest updates" eMail from the discussion board. They can feel satisfied they've increased their exposure.
Of course there's still no activity, so, in the fine tradition of beating one's head against the wall, another meaningless follow-up goes in . . .
Answer sophisticated questions.
And so on.
Fortunately many moderated boards ban this kind of activity as a form of "spamming." Unfortunately it happens in unmoderated boards rather too often, and from some surprising places. This example came from a discussion board on Linkedin, and was apparently being used as a marketing tactic by a VP at Sun Microsystems.
Bumping doesn't do much for your posts, and quickly gets you identified as a spammer. What's more, it demonstrates you can't learn. If a post isn't getting a response the answer is not to bump it, but to find out why it didn't work and correct it.
Previously on this blog...
the global leader in Contact Center Consolidation 2.0
2.0 has become a meaningless addition to already poor tag lines.
A dozen beautiful images of Saturn
Wired presents a dozen of the best images from the Cassini mission
Setting up shop in a new country: beyond the website
Building a website for multiple languages is not just about translation. It is a critical business decision that has to be taken carefully.
Why call centre staff deserve your respect
If call centre staff set the first impression for your business, why do we treat them so badly?
Becoming a Specialist? A hard decision to make ...
Specialising requires hard strategic decisions to be made about your business.
When good people move on
Losing a member of staff to another company is not necessarily a bad thing
The quest for quality in Agile Software Development
Why quality assurance remains a central part of project management, regardless of the use of Agile methods
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