Protecting Your Online Brand

We all have signed up for newsletters or made purchases online. Part of the process is the Captcha, the little box that you have to fill out to prove you are a real person not an automated bot. The Captcha stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” and was trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University. This valuable tool can help eliminate form spam, most of us take these usual random letter/number generators for granted.
Well not me, I always look at them and see if they are real words or just random gibberish, also trying to find unique words. I recently bought a Palm Treo 680 and was signing up for their MyPalm program and I found a unique word and was not impressed with my characters I had to type in, in fact I was a little offended. To be honest not that offended I thought it was funny, but I am willing to bet I am the exception. Some potential clients may have been so offended they may not have signed up for the service or if this would have been an online purchase cancelled their transaction and purchased elsewhere, losing out on this sale and potentially many other sales in the future.
So the lesson is, be careful of the image you portray on your site, whether it be content that you have direct control over or not, it may end up costing someone their a**s.