Alternate Title: How NOT to Do Social Media for Your Startup

This morning, I happily tweeted about the service UserTesting.com, which I’ve been using to get brutal but extremely helpful feedback on user experience at Referly.

The Twitter account for user testing startup BetaPunch replied (see the full thread of tweets here), asking why we weren’t using their service instead.

I replied that I was still annoyed (which I am) that they publicly tweeted links to the results of free usability tests they ran for us when we were trying out their product back in October (thankfully they agreed to delete the tweets at the time). After that, I felt like my privacy had been violated (and who really wants competitors, strangers, potential investors, etc. viewing user tests of their very early stage and admittedly confusing product) and we already were familiar with UserTesting.com so I decided to stick with them.

I figured there was some very junior social media person manning the account and assumed the conversation would probably end there. But it didn’t, so we have a little social media case study in what not to do if you’re going to chase after your competitor’s customers.

So, I won’t be using BetaPunch. They’re rude, don’t respect my privacy, and clearly don’t want me to be their customer anyway. Not sure how they missed “the customer’s always right” – but I’d settle for “don’t be mean to customers” in this case.

I don’t need to be right, I just need to be right enough to want to pay you.

What do you think, is it ungrateful to trial a freemium product and then not upgrade? Let me know what you think in the comments.

And BetaPunch, you’re welcome for the traffic… enjoy the SEO, too.