After I and Inquisitr’s Duncan Riley yesterday both expressed a bit of apprehension that the sometimes unscrupulous world of affiliate and MLM marketing might be making its way to the Twittersphere, John Reese (founder of traffic funnelling pyramid scheme BlogRush) decided to “set the record straight” on his personal blog. Unfortunately for John, much like in his marketing verbiage, he was unable to stay very far away from hyperbole and the ridiculous allegation that I didn’t research my position before I promoted it.
Of the many things that John took issue with, the first thing he mentioned was that both Duncan and I didn’t do our research. As evidence of this, he bragged that he’d “never sold an ebook since I’ve been marketing online for over 15 years.” I stand corrected on this point. He gave away ebooks to sell “digital home study materials.“ Essentially, books on CD. Not ebooks, per se, but pretty close.
Most of the rest of his post, in retort, reads like the marketing verbiage you probably remember from BlogRush and from the excerpts of his Twitter letter Duncan and I quoted. “I’m the best,” and “I’ve made high traffic sites,” and “I made all this money, and it was only my side project.” I’m sure that impresses a lot of folks, otherwise how else would have have sold all his “not-ebooks.” His defenses of his actions seem to amount to “I’m rich, so I’m right.” Bank robbers can be rich, too. That doesn’t make them right either.
His thrust of his retorts seem to be that I’m some sort of anti-marketing hippie, and that my “lack of research” is a thorough indication that something is rotten in the state of Mashable (or perhaps even blogging entirely?). Anyone that has followed my opinion pieces in general, or who actually knows me, knows this is laughable, as I’ve many times defended marketing from undue government regulation and attack. What I (and most human beings, for that matter) hate with a passion are hucksters trying to pawn off on me something I don’t need or have any use or interest in. This is something in which, unfortunately, the affiliate marketing world excels in. That isn’t an indictment of everyone who might be an affiliate marketer, but it is an indictment of a lot of the more visible members of this demographic.
I know of what I speak, on this. Many years ago, I was a CTO at a credit assistance agency that employed affiliate marketing techniques for a time to grow the business. As such, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about the MLM world, but was afraid to ask. I could describe my experiences there in detail, but the best analogy I can provide to you as to how the MLM and affiliate marketing world works is to liken it to a spyware infection.
When you’re infected by one piece of spyware, it often opens the floodgates for a host of other virus, malware and spyware infections. Similarly, you talk to one affiliate marketer, who may be a decent guy and wants to sell you something you need or sell something for you. Unfortunately, just by talking to that one fellow, it seems you soon have (no exaggeration) have hundreds of marketers beating down your door and flooding your inbox with ridiculous offers, pie-in-the-sky schemes, get-rich-quick scams and often outlandish conspiracy theories.
(Imagine that for a moment, and amplify it through the megaphone of Twitter-mania. Twitter could get really unbearable while affiliate marketers infiltrate, amass hordes of followers, and start trying to sell their ebooks on ways to infiltrate twitter, amass hordes of followers and sell ebooks on …. )
John notes my extreme dissatisfaction with BlogRush in his response to me, and promises me a full refund for my investment (a clever distraction of a promise, since the widget and “service” was free). He then goes on to boast that the BlogRush service garners more traffic than Mashable. His defense is to intimate that there was no harm done by hoodwinking thousands of bloggers into installing a useless widget. It’s true that no actual money was lost, but it doesn’t make it right, valuable to anyone (other than John and his team), or even honest.
At the end of the day, I’m still a fan of marketing (contrary to the laughable claims of John Reese’s groupies of me being a socialist), but that doesn’t have to make me a fan of John Reese. While his moves may have made him rich, nothing I’ve seen in his past shows me that he’s done much to separate himself from the shadier marketers in the very same space as him. Despite his claims to the contrary, nothing on the public record (read: researchable) shows that he’s a trustworthy member of the social media community at large (particularly since his defense of himself was full of truth-twisting and hyperbole). In the end, it is that which make me doubt his intentions aren’t to make Twitter part of some affiliate marketing scheme - something I nor anyone else is going to enjoy.
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