Tag: abraham lincoln

By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , , , ,

But why would you want to? If you want to market dishonestly, the person you’re really fooling is yourself. Because it is not effective in the long run, and the long run is what builds a business.

Two examples:

The Secret Spammer

Someone posted this on a LinkedIn discussion today:

 The promotion plan used by [company name] works very well. [company URL]

Always on the lookout for good resources for myself and my clients, I clicked through. First thing I saw was the same guy’s picture, so this was not exactly an unbiased recommendation. And then after clicking in a couple of pages, I found this:

The email blast and daily email advertising to 4 million recipients will cost you only $35 for a lifetime membership. (not included in the package) However, you will learn how to use emailing effectively, what company or companies to use, and how to effectively send email ads.

4 million e-mails a day over multiple days? If that’s not spam, I don’t know what is.  There’s no way this list is targeted, and there’s no way it will help the reputation of any product associated with it. So I responded:

I am sorry, but I looked at your site, Fred (and it would be nice if you were more up front about your relationship to it)–you’re going to send 4 million e-mails for an author? That is SPAM–a wretched curse on the planet. It makes everything else you offer to do suspect.

I have a section in one of my books called “Spam–the newbies’ natural mistake.” You’re not a newbie, though. The site is professionally designed and convincing on first glance. So you know better. Why are you doing this?

If you use sleazy, illegal, unpleasant tactics, that’s how people will think of your book. I will NOT be recommending this one to my clients.

The Bait-and-Switch Home Contractor

A few months ago, I bought a Groupon from a heating-duct cleaning service. But when the technician arrived, he told me the $69 duct cleanout was only good if I first signed up for a $1900 heating system overhaul. No upgrade? Then no work.

This is dumb on so many levels! First of all, you never require an upsell. That’s called bait-and-switch, and is illegal, for good reason. Second, if you try to upsell somebody, your offer should be in tune with the original price. so maybe you offer a $99 or $109 upgrade to your $69 original offer. You’re not going to get many takers if your upsell is 27.53 times the original price, pushing it from two figures to four. Third, if you want to sell someone something 27 times the original price, you need to build trust and show you’re capable of the small stuff. And fourth, if you’re using an outside lead generation system (in this case, Groupon), you don’t want to piss them off. I am sure I am not the only one who got a full credit of my $69 from Groupon, which offers a satisfaction guarantee. How willing will Groupon be to ever work with this company again if some huge percentage of sales have to be refunded?

As Abraham Lincoln allegedly said, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

And as I say, “if you build a business by fooling people, the worst fool is yourself.”

In my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet, I talk at some length about long-term customer relationships—how they are key to repeat business, and how repeat customers are five to ten times more profitable than using traditional marketing to bring in new customers. If you have to keep dredging the lakes for people you haven’t ripped off yet, your business is not sustainable.

So, for both ethical and practical reasons, do the right thing and don’t be like either of those fools I cited.

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By Posted on Posted in censorship, Democracy, Diversity, Ethics in Government, language, Media Ethics, National Conference on Media Reform, Politics, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Publishing, Social and Economic Justice, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

An Oregon judge ruled that blogging is not protected as journalism under the state’s journalism shield law. If allowed to stand, this sets a truly terrible precedent.

Here’s what the law says:

No person connected with, employed by or engaged in any medium of communication to the public shall be required by … a judicial officer … to disclose, by subpoena or otherwise … [t]he source of any published or unpublished information obtained by the person in the course of gathering, receiving or processing information for any medium of communication to the public[.]

Notice—there is nothing here about working for a recognized mainstream media outlet. By my reading, a guy in a clown suit standing on a milk crate in the park and haranguing a crowd of random passers-by would not have to disclose sources.

Yet here’s what U.S. District Judge Marco A. Hernandez wrote:

. . . although defendant is a self-proclaimed “investigative blogger” and defines herself as “media,” the record fails to show that she is affiliated with any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system. Thus, she is not entitled to the protections of the law

Hello! Since when does being a journalist require working for mainstream media? This country has a history of independent writers serving a journalistic role going back to those 18th-century “bloggers” Tom Paine and Ben Franklin—those guys didn’t write for the London Times, but started their own publications. Are you going to tell me that Daily Kos, Huffington Post, RedState, Drudge Report, Washington Spectator, and even the legendary I.F. Stone’s Weekly of the 1950s and 1960s have no place in the world of journalism? That the thousands of indy-media-istas who attend the National Conference for Media Reform are spitting in the wind?

And meanwhile, investigative blogger Crystal Cox is facing a $2.5 million judgment because she would not disclose her sources. Out-bloody-rageous!

Shame on you, Judge Hernandez!

Abraham Lincoln said, “It is a sin to be silent when it is your duty to protest.” I am protesting. And I hope voices with more clout than mine, such as FreePress.net, the National Writers Union, Authors Guild, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), People for the American Way, National Coalition Against Censorship, and opinion journalists working for mainstream media (like Rachel Maddow) jump in and protest as well—with amicus briefs filed for the appeal.

 

Kris Miller Law is a respected and trusted  criminal defense attorney ready to help you with your legal needs.

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By Posted on Posted in Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Shannon Cherry posed an interesting question on her blog: how encouraging should she be of people who want to train with her and then essentially remarket her stuff? Should she be a thought leader, or build a brand?

I was perhaps a bit rambly in my response (even citing the Old Testament—Abraham as a persuasive marketer!), but I still think it’s worth sharing here, since the question touches on a number of concepts I’ve explored over the years:

  • How much should you cooperate with competitors?
  • Is the world grounded in abundance, or in scarcity?
  • How does it benefit you when you train a competitor?

Here’s what I wrote:

Shannon, I’ve experienced this tension many times. It’s easier to make my peace with other people getting wealthy (wealthier than I am) from my ideas, when I remember a few things:

1) As someone who describes myself as “in constant learning mode,” I have drawn from dozens of teachers and books over decades, synthesizing what works for me and putting my own imprint on the overall combination–which has quite a bit of original thought mixed in as well. But let’s face it: 80% of what I know and teach owes some debt to someone, somewhere—but not the same someone. So when someone borrows form me as part of their own larger mix, I’m OK with that (especially if they’re considerate enough to acknowledge me).

It would be a bit different if someone took and bottled everything I know as their own. I certainly get teed off when I see other people’s bylines on something I wrote—unless it went out as a press release, and then I see it as a supreme complement (I still remember the bylined NY Times article from maybe 10 years ago that lifted whole paragraphs from a press release I wrote for a client). But if someone takes one or two of my ideas and mixes it with some from others and some of their own, I think they are the legitimate owners of that “marketing salad.” I can’t think of any marketer whose ideas are 100% original; even Claude Hopkins studied his predecessors. Some, like Jay Abraham, Janet Switzer, and Dan Kennedy, may have more originality than most, but they are not working in a vaccuum. I suspect strongly that Dan Kennedy studied Jeffrey Lant, and that Lant studied Melvin Powers, and that Powers studied John Caples and Hopkins, and back it goes, past Lincoln, Jefferson, and Franklin, at least as far as the Biblical Abraham, who used his marketing skills to persuade God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah if he could find ten righteous people. (Abraham won the argument, but couldn’t find the 10.)

2) I was so enchanted by Alex Mandossian’s concept of “the paradox of syndication” that I put it in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. This is kind of a bit like Godin’s Idea Virus: you get your stuff into as many places as possible, and it grows for you. A great example of this is Amazon: With the brilliant idea to offer a no-inventory, no-work bookstore to all sorts of mom-and-pop websites in the mid-90s, Amazon became a powerhouse. It was years later before so much of the action moved to Amazon’s own site; in the early days, it spread by offering this no-work profit center to anyone who wanted it. Again, when someone spreads your stuff around, it’s on some level a deep complement. Of course, it’s much more of a complement if they give you credit. I’m a big believer in this; my books typically have long lists of acknowledgments and lots of sources cited in the text. But if your plan is to be a thought leader, it kind of goes with the territory.

For myself, I’ve decided that spreading the idea virus, being the thought leader, is more important to me than getting the glory, since I am motivated by a strong desire to create social change. But the glory certainly feels good! I think Nancy Marmolejo may have said it best in her comment:

Thought leaders don’t ask permission, they go for it. Be the one who makes this a “both/and” story, not an “either/or”.

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