This is about how our internal conversation went last week:

“So you heard about the Posterous Switch Campaign, right?”

Position #1: Bold-Faced Reality. Suck it up.

Posterous believes in their product, and is willing to stick its neck out for it. They didn’t insult anyone outright- and if another company was insulted, they should step back and evaluate what can be done better. It’s an opportunity for competitors to resist the urge to retaliate, and focus on improvement.

In the end, I think people will choose the better product.

Position #2: D*ckhead Move. Think, first.

Yeah, but in marketing, unless done carefully, (which I don’t believe this is) it’s generally considered a bad idea to give air time to your competitors. I mean they actually listed them… (Although I almost feel a little hypocritical… On our website, we clearly call out our competitor by stating that our product is not Basecamp. Maybe we should take our own advice…)

And to call Tumblr a dying platform, when Posterous relies on email for a major input pattern seems totally wack.

I’ll admit it’s good that they made publicity. But at what cost? I would rather make lots of friends, and grow slowly. Learning from, and try to draft off of our competitors’ speed than create a turf war.

I think it’s been proven that this technique works best online… Instead of fighting your competitor- make them obsolete by embracing those things that users like… Use their own API to offer easy ways to integrate, and slowly erode their core service.

So, since we don’t seem to agree, we’re asking you. What do you think?