On Not Playing The Blame Game

Is the Inter­net mar­ket­ing indus­try implod­ing? I think it is. But if not, it sure seems like it. In fact, it seems to be a sign of the times.

For exam­ple, we see it with the FTC crack­ing down on mis­lead­ing adver­tis­ers, Visa and Mas­ter­Card clos­ing down mer­chant accounts for forced con­ti­nu­ity billings, and Google per­ma­nently ban­ning adver­tis­ers for rea­sons still unclear but some­how related to the lat­est crackdown.

Harsh? Per­haps. But we can’t say we didn’t see it coming.

Remem­ber, it was about three years ago — wow, has it been three years already? — when my wife, Sylvie Fortin, put out her scathing report, called “Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Sins.”

It was highly con­tro­ver­sial at the time because peo­ple didn’t expect it. How­ever, since then many mar­keters, blog­gers, jour­nal­ists, dis­grun­tled clients, unpaid affil­i­ates, even social media experts have joined in the cho­rus. Some, qui­etly. Oth­ers, not so quietly.

For instance, copy­writer Ryan Healy ruf­fled a few feath­ers recently by post­ing a scathing report, enti­tled “Inter­net Mar­ket­ing on Life Sup­port,” in which he sin­gled out a few mar­keters for their ques­tion­able, uneth­i­cal, or allegedly ille­gal practices.

One com­menter praised Ryan for his will­ing­ness to name names, and by the same token crit­i­cized my wife for not doing so in her Sins report. In fact, since it was pub­lished, we received a lot of flak for not nam­ing names. I cer­tainly under­stand their cynicism.

So I’m tak­ing this oppor­tu­nity to elab­o­rate on why we chose not to name names.

The aim of this blog post is not to per­se­cute those who do. Just because we didn’t name names doesn’t mean we’re against those who do. Not at all. But I do want to clar­ify in the hope that you, dear reader, under­stand why we didn’t expose actual marketers.

First of all, we wanted to focus on the sin, not the sinner.

I agree that nam­ing names works well. It can be poten­tially pro­duc­tive in stop­ping that one per­son — and maybe a few oth­ers who fear the same humil­i­at­ing fate — from con­tin­u­ing their harm­ful prac­tices. But it doesn’t work all the time. It might even backfire.

Why? Because the cult-​​like sta­tus these snake-​​oil pitch­men enjoy, which in some cases are so deeply entrenched, might even boost their posi­tion among their loyal fan base.

(I’ll come back to this later, as under­stand­ing this is of sig­nif­i­cant importance.)

Plus, I also agree that sham­ing peo­ple pub­licly has always been a pro­duc­tive tech­nique to quench people’s thirst for blood. As the news indus­try say­ing goes, “If it bleeds, it reads.” But in my opin­ion, doing so doesn’t help the actual under­ly­ing problem.

We applaud those who are will­ing to take the risk. But if and when they do name names, they must do so with eyes wide open, ready to bear the bur­den of respon­si­bil­ity that comes along with point­ing fin­gers — and the neg­a­tive blow­back such a risk entails.

For us, we didn’t want to throw stones for a vari­ety of rea­sons. The most impor­tant of which is the idea that we didn’t want peo­ple to per­ceive our report as exhaus­tive. We sim­ply can’t return to the report to rewrite, edit, add more names, and so on.

Even­tu­ally, it would make us feel com­pelled to revisit the report, which is some­thing we were not pre­pared to do. After all, we are too busy run­ning our own businesses.

Sim­ply, it wasn’t our goal. Fur­ther­more, nam­ing names is risky because it can also be mis­lead­ing. Oth­ers per­pe­trat­ing the same or sim­i­lar “sins,” if omit­ted from the report, may be seen as exon­er­ated or exempted by their own set of followers.

They might say, “Hey, Sylvie talked about Guru ‘A’ doing such and such. Since I fol­low Guru ‘B’, then I’m fine (or he is fine, or the prac­tice is fine and it’s OK to do it, too).”

Sec­ond, we didn’t want to become known as the “Jerry Springer of Inter­net mar­ket­ing.” We wanted our report to be food for thought. We wanted peo­ple to start ques­tion­ing. To start think­ing crit­i­cally. And not just to sit idly by, watch­ing as the drama unfolds.

Years ago, I closed down my once very pop­u­lar copy­writ­ing forum for this very reason.

(And believe me, I received a lot of flak for doing that, too.)

As the owner, I was the main mod­er­a­tor. But I never real­ized until the board became more and more pop­u­lar just how much work I needed to put into mod­er­at­ing and man­ag­ing it, thus tak­ing my focus away from build­ing my other, more prof­itable businesses.

Before you think that I should have out­sourced the mod­er­a­tion, remem­ber that I did have close to 10 mod­er­a­tors at one point. But the prob­lem was exac­er­bated when I was even forced into mod­er­at­ing the mod­er­a­tors. (Yes, many a fight broke out among them, too.)

So I decided to shut it down. It was a hard deci­sion to make.

Nev­er­the­less, point­ing fin­gers wasn’t our goal. We weren’t look­ing for fans. Instead, we were look­ing to help. We didn’t want to be judges but advo­cates. Our goal was to focus on the con­sumer and would-​​be mar­keters con­tem­plat­ing such practices.

We wanted to alert the mar­ket­place on what’s going on, and edu­cate peo­ple on how to dis­cern, pin­point, and avoid poten­tial pit­falls — some of which are so sneaky and incon­spic­u­ous, they prey on unsus­pect­ing vic­tims who don’t know any better.

More­over, we wanted to avoid the “any pub­lic­ity is good pub­lic­ity” some of these cult lead­ers enjoy but most cer­tainly don’t deserve. So we pre­ferred high­light­ing what to look out for and even go so far as to sug­gest action­able solu­tions, than who to look out for.

Now, here’s what I mean when I said nam­ing names can be counterproductive.

First, I’m not a psy­chol­o­gist by any stretch. But as a copy­writer, I have stud­ied human psy­chol­ogy and researched it deeply — both in col­lege and in my career. It’s part of my job. I don’t know enough to be an expert, but I do know enough to know the difference.

That said, because of the cult-​​like fol­low­ing some of these mar­keters enjoy (it’s no won­der we call them “gurus”), nam­ing them can lead to some unin­tended consequences.

When you are attack­ing a cult leader, you are also, by the same token, attack­ing all of their sheeple in one fell swoop. Some will be dis­mis­sive and shrug your attempts. Oth­ers will react hos­tilely, per­haps even vio­lently, to your accusations.

Nam­ing names strength­ens the posi­tion of these cult lead­ers as their fol­low­ers will likely feel threat­ened, too. In fact, the more you chal­lenge someone’s opin­ion, the more con­vinced they become that their opin­ion is cor­rect, and the greater their resolve will be.

As Brian Tracy once noted, in his pro­gram The Psy­chol­ogy of Selling:

“A man con­vinced against his will, is of the same opin­ion still.”

When ques­tion­ing, chal­leng­ing, or oppos­ing their deeply rooted beliefs — beliefs into which peo­ple have invested much ego, time, and of course, money — they will have a ten­dency to rig­or­ously defend those beliefs by defend­ing their cult leader.

Again, think of the brain­wash­ing process behind cults. It’s some­thing I have per­son­ally stud­ied for many years. And what I’ve learned is, when peo­ple react to a chal­lenge, it’s not about defend­ing their cho­sen guru. It’s about defend­ing one’s belief sys­tem.

Most do it uncon­sciously and qui­etly. Many do it pub­licly and vocif­er­ously. And as we all know from events through­out his­tory, some will do it aggres­sively. Even violently.

If you want some sci­ence behind it, here’s an inter­est­ing fact.

Even if you think you’re not at all sex­ist, racist, or homo­pho­bic, most of us are to some degree. We can pro­claim that we’re not, and protest fero­ciously when we’re called to task. But sub­con­sciously, like it or not our brain’s cir­cuitry tells another tale.

For exam­ple, take this online Implicit Test from Har­vard, made famous by Mal­colm Glad­well in his book “Blink.” It might enlight­ened you. Per­haps even shock you.

The point is, even if you think you’re not sex­ist, racist, or biased against any other kind of stereo­type, your brain is wired in such a way that you will have a ten­dency to be biased, no mat­ter what. You will tend to favor one over the other, even if only slightly.

Granted, some of it is genetic and innate. But a lot of it is the result of envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors, such as our upbring­ing, soci­etal mores, edu­ca­tion, and per­sonal experience.

Peo­ple have pre­con­ceived biases, which are strength­ened over time. Even when they say they don’t or that they are open-​​minded, when pre­sented with hard evi­dence to the con­trary only solid­i­fies their estab­lished mind­sets, beliefs, and in some cases, delusions.

I remem­ber read­ing an arti­cle once, where they likened “depro­gram­ming cult fol­low­ers” to break­ing in a wild horse. The first few attempts seem futile. But the more they try to break in the horse, the angrier and more aggres­sive the horse becomes.

(Until, that is, the horse finally gives up and calms down.)

Sim­i­larly, the risk you run by call­ing out some mar­keter can, in many cases, strengthen that person’s posi­tion in the minds of their fol­low­ers because you are in essence chal­leng­ing belief sys­tems. You are bash­ing not just the guru but their fol­low­ers, too.

Thus, they will believe in their guru even more, and even vocally and pub­licly defend them. But in real­ity, what they are doing is defend­ing their own belief sys­tems, for fear they’d real­ize and must acknowl­edge they were wrong all along. And peo­ple hate that.

As the say­ing goes in the sell­ing and mar­ket­ing worlds, peo­ple fear mak­ing a bad deci­sion. It’s human nature. And it’s the basis behind cog­ni­tive dis­so­nance (i.e., buyer’s remorse). That’s why we’re told to sell on emo­tion first and then back it up with logic.

When peo­ple make an emo­tional deci­sion, they will search for log­i­cal rea­sons to jus­tify their deci­sions to avoid the risk of feel­ing wronged, hurt, or duped, or being per­ceived as fool­ish among their peers. And among their own fol­low­ers, if they have any.

A good exam­ple? Look at polit­i­cal debates.

Sel­dom will you see debates sway­ing any votes from either side. They only serve to strengthen the already pre­set opin­ions of each polit­i­cal candidate’s fan base. Sta­tis­ti­cally, debates are seen as use­ful only to attract unde­cided vot­ers to their camp.

(Many come out of such debates more con­fused and unde­cided than before, too.)

If peo­ple bought from ques­tion­able mar­keters in the past, if their pur­chase hap­pened to turn out to be rel­a­tively good, and if they’re in the process of buy­ing more prod­ucts from them, then they, too, don’t want to feel like their orig­i­nal pur­chase was a bad decision.

This is par­tic­u­larly true if they were sup­port­ive and even raved about it pub­licly. Nobody likes being wrong. But more impor­tant, nobody wants to be seen as being wrong. Every­one wants to save face. So nat­u­rally, they try to avoid buyer’s remorse.

So they turn a blind eye to any­thing that might cause them such remorse.

That’s why, in many cases, they stub­bornly rein­force their deci­sions and staunchly defend their beliefs, out of their need for self-​​preservation, and to assuage their innate fears and inse­cu­ri­ties. (Abra­ham Maslow’s pyra­mid of human motives comes to mind.)

Finally, a final com­ment on nam­ing names.

Fin­ger­point­ing does offer relief to some, and cre­ates cheer­ing fans for oth­ers. But in large part, they run the great risk of degen­er­at­ing into end­less piss­ing matches that lead to nowhere, except to more hurt­ing, more name-​​calling, and even more fingerpointing.

If my expe­ri­ence as a forum owner is any indi­ca­tion, it can be per­ceived as no more than a play­ground, push-​​and-​​shove fight, where onlook­ers cheer on their pre­ferred playmate.

When caught, both point the fin­ger at each other, shout­ing, “He started it!” Which inevitably lands the two in the principal’s office, regard­less of who’s at fault.

Lynn Terry made a superb point on her blog when she was defend­ing her­self in the face of sim­i­lar accu­sa­tions that resulted from Ryan’s blog post. She wrote a post in which she said, “Peo­ple who put titles on me do so only to define them­selves.” Won­der­fully said.

While she may be talk­ing about being labeled as a “second-​​rate guru,” I think it fits nicely those among the guru crowd who have the brazen audac­ity to label their affil­i­ates, clients, or non-​​clients as “losers.” Unfor­tu­nately, many have. Even publicly.

So to con­clude, I often think of the say­ing that says, when you point one fin­ger at some­one, four more are point­ing right back at you. And for that rea­son, we wrote the report as a way to extend a help­ing hand rather than point any fin­gers much less wag them.

About the Author

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