This post I wrote somehow made its way to Today Online. Boy oh boy..did I learn something from this experience.
The reproduced post below.
The current issue with DBS High Notes is an interesting one for me because I did consider buying similar products. A few things stopped me from buying though.
One of the first things I learned as a teenager is that if you cannot convince someone, then confuse them. Reading the prospectus for the products definitely confused me. When I get confused, the other party loses my trust.
During a dinner with a group of friends, a Government official asked a banker his opinion about structured products sold by his bank. The banker then advised the official not to buy the product if he had the know-how, as he could get better returns from his own investment. He also explained that the products only worked if the markets behaved within a certain range — it was only safe within that range.
Think about this for a moment: A banker advised someone not to buy his own company’s product. The banker assumed his friend could do better, thinking that his bank would just mess things up. Most of all, the banker didn’t think it was worth paying the bank anything.
Some thoughts.
I learned the ‘if you cannot convince, confuse them’ idea in NS. Sure, I was a teenager then, but removing the context of NS somehow, at least to me, dilutes the message I was trying to convey.
The other thing was the way this line was paraphrased –
The banker assumed the friend could do better as opposed to the banker thinking his bank will just mess things up.
What I meant was the banker didn’t think his bank would screw up but his advice was based on the notion that if you knew what you were doing, you could do better investing yourself than giving the bank any money especially considering the fees you had to pay them.
Now… it is interesting that mainstream newspapers are using the posts written by bloggers. I think in the long run it is a good thing.
However, there is a problem when the words get changed because then what gets printed is based on the journalist’s understanding of the post and not what the blogger said. This however doesn’t mean the journalist who edited and printed my post is at fault for the ‘lost in translation’. What it does mean is that if bloggers want to have increased credibility, and mainstream newspapers printing our posts most certainly adds to that credibility, we have to take more responsibility for our words and our ideas and write better when trying to communicate our thoughts.
The beauty about blogs and online publishing is that we are able to easily update and clarify what was previously said. In the past, if I had been interviewed for the article and I was misquoted, I would have no recourse to clarify the statements attributed to me – with blogs and other forms of social media, I do.
Oh… finally, I would like to thank the journalist who found the post worth sharing and also thanks to Back2Nature for sharing with me about my post appearing on Today.
