Vistaprint Shoot In Foot?

[John Jupp]

Tweet

Dear John,

Please kindly note that VistaPrint is adding new social media terms to its current policy. The new terms are:

SOCIAL MEDIA/SOCIAL NETWORKS
Affiliate partners are prohibited from using Vistaprint.com, the Vistaprint trademark, the Vistaprint name, misspellings of the name, or variations of the company's trademark or name (Vista print, Vistaprints, Vistaprinting, etc.) on any social media or social networking tools and sites as a means to push offers, deals, coupons or promotions of any kind. Affiliates are also prohibited from creating groups or specific web pages (in social communities) around Vistaprint offers. Vistaprint will quickly address (and reserves the right to) any affiliate partner who Spams or participates in any other acts that the company deems inappropriate with regards to social media or social networks.

These terms take affect from Wednesday 8th September 2010.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in contact.

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Now this is going to be a serious technical challenge as all my offers automatically get populated via social network in an automated feed process.

[dkaria]

Hi John,

I'm sorry for any inconvenience this is going to cause.

I will speak to Vista Print and try to find a solution to work around this.

Once I get some response I will be in touch.

If you want to discuss this further, please dont hesitate to contact me directly.

Kind Regards

Dipesh Karia
Account Manager
E-Mail: dkaria@webgains.com

[John Jupp]

Thanks Dipesh

Please let me know when you have received a reply and I'll contact you. I auto populate via toolbar, twitter and facebook from two offer sites. We import the offers and once added to site the sites then automatically provide both rss and entries via our own offer feed straight to those and other social media and social network sites. Writing a sub routine to ignore all offers from Vista Print would be very time consuming.

[Mogga]

Not the most barking thing I've read today

Rupert Murdoch claims to own the 'Sky' in 'Skype' - Online, Media - The Independent

[dkaria]

Hi John,

I have had a response back from VistaPrint and their statement is as follows:

"Vistaprint's social media policy does not include blogs. Social networks to the company includes sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr, Identi.ca,Yelp, Craigslist, etc. Please note that this only includes using the company’s brand including Vistaprint, Vista Print, Vistaprints, etc. You may promote the offer without the brand. For example:

Approved – 90% off business cards with free shipping – XYZ.com
Not-approved – 90% off business cards from Vistaprint – XYZ.com

All offenders will be contacted directly."

I hope this makes things a bit more clear.

If you do have any further questions, please do not hesitate to get in contact.

Dipesh Karia
Account Manager

[John Jupp]

Thanks for the reply Dipesh. We are writing a sub routine to strip out the Vistaprint offers from Twitter and Facebook but the offers shall remain on the toolbar as all users are opt in customers. As that is a social networking tool as per the description I thought you should know.

[John Jupp]

Becomes

[dkaria]

Ah cool, thanks for showing me

Sorry for the inconvenience this caused you.

[John Jupp]

It's ok.

The sub routine took all of 10 minutes to do (I won't bill Vistaprint ).

So if we can stop it appearing on populated automated feeds then anyone can.