Losing Cyprus Mail trust over FXTM

Disclaimer #1: For the last few years I’ve worked in the Forex industry. I worked for a number of companies – FxPro, Traders Trust, FXCC, and, currently, Easy Forex.  I was also involved with a few others.  But I’ve always worked in the IT and web development part of those companies – never in marketing, or “anti-marketing”, sales, or any other business unit.

Disclaimer #2: A few of my friends – close and otherwise – work for FXTM.  Even though, FXTM is a new company, and it is a direct competitor of the company I work for, this rant is not so much against FXTM, who are simply looking for exposure anywhere they can find, but rather against Cyprus Mail, which is a well established mass media entity with a long history.

Disclaimer #3: Purely for legal reasons, pretty much everything in this post is my personal opinion, which might or might not coincide with my current employer.

Now, to the business.  A couple of days ago, my eye caught this article in Cyprus Mail.

FXTM will be marking a strong presence at this year’s iFXEXPO, promoting their innovative partnership programs and in particular the FXTM Introducer Programme.

The FXTM team can be found at the  expo’s Stand 16, eager to welcome visitors and explain the unique features of the company’s all-new partnership programmes.

That was my first “oh, really?”.  If you are not living in Limassol, you might not be familiar with the fact, that it is somewhat of a “Forex capital”.  There plenty of Forex companies based here. There are plenty of local offices for Forex companies based outside. Heck, there are even plenty of companies who are not directly Forex brokers, but who are based around Forex industry.

So, what’s the problem? – you ask.  I’ll tell you.  Pretty much every single one of those companies are taking part in the iFXEXPO.  This year and years before.  What is so special about FXTM taking part in it?  Absolutely nothing.  That’s just one of those companies participating in something that everybody else is participating.  Hardly any news.  But.  For one reason or another, Cyprus Mail decides to cover just this company.

What’s that?  An advertising?  I don’t mind that too much.  Try to stay away from them, or clearly mark one as such, and I don’t have any problem at all.  After all, everybody needs to make a living.

My second “oh, really?” comes from a bit of censorship.  Obviously, I wasn’t happy with such blatant advertising in a newspaper.  So, I wrote a very polite (in my humble opinion) comment, pointing out the article being a blatant advertising.  Expressed opinion, nothing more.  Guess what happened to that comment? It got deleted.  Oops.

I’ve been online for a few years now, and I completely understand that Cyprus Mail has the full right to control the content, including the comments, of their site.  But, to me personally, it looked weird.  After all, there was no hate or anything like that in the comment (again, IMHO).  And, I’ve seen Cyprus Mail keeping criticizing comments before.  It’s feedback, isn’t it?  We all have opinions, we all make mistakes, and we all disagree with each other.  The world would be a boring place if everybody agreed on every point.  But, they chose to remove it.

Fine! I’m not gonna whine and complain more about it.  It is their right to do so.  But it is also, I believe so, my right to express my opinion.  And, gladly, I have my own place where I can express it.  So, even if it’s gone from the Cyprus Mail site and Facebook comments that they are currently using, it’s still gonna be here.

So, in summary, here it goes.

1. I think publishing the FXTM article without clearly marking it as an ad was a mistake on behalf of Cyprus Mail.
2. I think removing a criticizing comment without any sort of notification to the author was a mistake on behalf of Cyprus Mail.
3. We all make mistakes (we are mere humans after all).  But I believe that we are capable of learning from mistakes.  So, even when one is done, or even if someone just thinks that ones  is done, I think it is important to have this feedback, understand it, and figure out if the mistake was actually made or not, and, furthermore, figure out how to fix it.

P.S.: And this is not the only FXTM-related article in Cyprus Mail either.  Here are another two that I’ve managed to find with a quick seach – one and two.

Update (May 31, 2013): there appears to be a bit of confusion over the deleted comment.  It might be a malfunction on the side of the Cyprus Mail’s website.  Or it might be my own stupidity.  If that’s the latter, I sincerely apologize to everyone.  I can see two different URLs to the same story.  One is on Cyprus Mail Beta site, which has my comment.  And another one is on Cyprus Mail WWW site, which doesn’t.  I have no clue why both of these exist and why they are different.