Are your marketing people bad-mouthing competition (behind your back) ?!

Chanced upon a referrer link from collecta.com to my personal blog. Checked out to see the context of how my blog got referenced. Collecta provides search for real time content. So I assumed that my blog should have got into the results because of the "CRM" keyword in my post on iFreeTools CRM.

So did a search for "CRM", to check out the results in collecta. Right on top of the results was a tweet on Zoho CRM, rather in a negative way, which I knew was far from truth (if I cannot say "an outright lie"). For those unaware, Zoho (previously AdventNet) was my employer for 100 months right from when I was fresh out of college until I quit to start out on my own, about a year back.

Went to check out the twitter account of the user and found that it was used as a marketing tool (probably with a minimal cost-per-click and additional cost-per-action payments) to drive traffic to a competitor - FreeCRM. Nothing wrong in promoting ones products/services, but why provide wrong information about a competitor or make unsubstantiated claims..

Wrong info...
Zoho CRM goes down all the time this is better http://bit.ly/18lfAx
Zoho CRM has hidden costs and terrible support http://bit.ly/18lfAx

Unsubstantiated/Dubious claims..
Ranked #1 against Zoho CRM and Sugar CRM http://bit.ly/18lfAx

zohobiz is the handle for the Zoho focussed tweets, while bbakari tweets with more diversifications - targeting Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Sugar CRM and vTiger. Both twitter accounts use the same bitly link. The bitly link statistics available at http://bit.ly/info/18lfAx shows more than 16,557 clicks in less than 2 months.

Not sure if FreeCRM is aware of the methodology used, but they should be; And moreover they should not fund such marketing activities.

Puzzled at how both Zoho and FreeCRM allow such twitter accounts to exist and continue posting such tweets for around 2 months now !!

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(After yesterday's alpha release, Vendor module is now available as part of iFreeTools CRM - Alpha. Check it out and let me know your feedback).