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Once Upon a Time: A Rant On Common Courtesy

by Jennifer Gniadecki on May 14th, 2008

Once upon a time there was a paid forum, and I was a member. The forum was slow, I wasn’t learning anything, and I told the owner I was quitting. The owner of the forum, instead, gave me a free membership.

I heard through the grapevine (since it now seems the forum owners are passive aggressive LOL) that I wasn’t posting enough and they weren’t going to promote my products as an affiliate anymore. I was fine with that and thought, “Hey, I should go back and pay some attention to that forum.” So I visited, I posted on a couple of threads, but there still wasn’t a whole lot happening. So I went back in today to check again and….

….my account had been canceled….

Let me put a few things out there to help with potential misunderstanding:

1. I’m okay not being part of the group.
2. I know I originally asked to quit and the owner gave me a free membership.
3. It’s not like they kicked me out and now the forum rocks and I’m jealous.
4. Not my forum, not my rules. I know and respect they were under no obligation or promise.

My problem - my only problem - with this scenario is that no one took the three seconds to email me and let me know.

I have patience for many things, really I do, but a lack of common courtesy is not one of them.

Because I’ve had people ask me about the forum, and because I had a free membership, I kind of felt beholden to focus on the positive aspects of the site because they were kind to me.

When you breach that, anyone that asks is going to hear exactly what I think. Now with the spin of, “Oh, and the owners didn’t think I was worth a one line email, either.” Which is going to hold water with many of the people I talk to in that industry because I’m relatively well known.

Honestly I wish them all the luck in the world, because none of them have the skills to succeed…luck will be a very necessary factor in the decision.

For those of you that are still wondering what this has to do with networking, it’s this: Networking is all about relationships. Creating relationships, maintaining relationships, communicating during relationships. When you end a relationship without so much as a word, that’s crappy networking plain and simple.

Especially when you can’t even muster the energy to be polite. Who does business with people like that? Not me.

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POSTED IN: Networking Etiquette