The Ethics Of Stealth Marketing

Many people believe that stealth marketing is a shady, unethical way of advertising a product or service because it basically relies on deception. The advertiser willfully deceives his audience by not disclosing his relationship to the product or service being praised. Considering the negative reactions of people who realize they’ve been marketed to in this way, it is pretty apparent that a lot of risk is involved in using this marketing technique.

Stealth marketing is most popularly used in instances when a new product or service is receiving negative word of mouth from the general public. A new cell phone, for instance, might receive a huge number of poor reviews on a popular website. Naturally, the people thinking about buying this phone will think twice about doing so if it seems to have a uniformly negative rating. In this case, a company might begin engaging in stealth marketing by posting its own, positive reviews of the phone in order to counteract the negative ones that are piling up.

In this case, stealth marketing is almost certainly unethical. After all, the phone is obviously a poorly made product if so many people feel compelled to write drastically negative reviews about it. Others who are considering purchasing it in order to make an informed decision put their trust in the premise that the reviews are made by average, every day people - not marketing personnel. Without full disclosure, a company that posts positive reviews and ratings about its own products is actively deceiving the buying public.

Social Networking And Stealth Marketing

Stealth marketing may be performed in a number of different ways. The Internet has made it far easier to engage in, but there are ways of doing it through print media and even in person as well. Each different type of product generally requires a subtly different approach in order to use stealth marketing for maximum effect. The fact that it can be done in so many different ways is certainly a big contributor to the public’s growing lack of trust in advertisers.

In addition to posting positive reviews and ratings on various websites, the Internet can be used to perform stealth marketing in countless other ways. Social networking websites can be used to great effect in such efforts. Companies can create multiple fictional characters and give them profiles on a handful of such sites. Over time, they can build up large friends’ lists or a lot of followers; gradually, they can begin sending out links to products they really enjoy using - but that are actually well camouflaged advertisements.

As with all types of stealth marketing, creating fake profiles on social networking sites creates a false sense of trust between the consumer and the fictional character. When done correctly, the people this fictional character befriends never realizes that they are entirely fabricated; they may even begin respecting their opinion, which is the jackpot in terms of stealth marketing. With that kind of trust, the character can then be used to casually mention websites, services, products - anything the company wishes to market - in order to drum up interest in them.

Other Examples Of Stealth Marketing

On many occasions, companies have hired actors to engage in stealth marketing techniques. Sony Ericsson used 60 actors in 2002 in ten different cities to market a new camera phone. These actors would approach random strangers, asking them to take their picture. In doing this, the actors could engage the strangers in the benefits of their “cool new Sony Ericsson phone”, for example. This would plant the seeds in peoples’ minds about the benefits of the phone, and in some cases may have encouraged them to buy one of their own.

Longtime bloggers who have achieved respectable followings are occasionally recruited by companies for stealth marketing campaigns. These bloggers are paid by the companies to write positive posts about their experiences with a company’s products, services or events. When done correctly, the readership of the blog never realizes that they are being advertised to; the key to this type of stealth marketing is maintaining the same tone regular readers are used to, and making a believable post about the benefits of the product in question.

Whether or not one believes stealth marketing is ethical, what’s undeniable is that it can backfire. Anyone who chooses to use this marketing technique needs to be supremely careful not to reveal the company’s identity. Consumers who discover they have been surreptitiously advertised to usually form very negative opinions about the company that pulled the wool over their eyes.

In a word….don’t do it. You’ll only ruin what you’ve worked so hard at developing…trust.

Dear Microsoft Customer,

Please notice that Microsoft company has recently issued a Security Update for OS Microsoft Windows. The update applies to the following OS versions: Microsoft Windows 98, Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows Millenium, Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows Vista.

Please notice, that present update applies to high-priority updates category. In order to help protect your computer against security threats and performance problems, we strongly recommend you to install this update.

Since public distribution of this Update through the official website http://www.microsoft.com would have result in efficient creation of a malicious software, we made a decision to issue an experimental private version of an update for all Microsoft Windows OS users.

As your computer is set to receive notifications when new updates are available, you have received this notice. In order to start the update, please follow the step-by-step instruction:

1. Run the file, that you have received along with this message.
2. Carefully follow all the instructions you see on the screen.

If nothing changes after you have run the file, probably in the settings of your OS you have an indication to run all the updates at a background routine. In that case, at this point the upgrade of your OS will be finished.

We apologize for any inconvenience this back order may be causing you.

Thank you,

Steve Lipner
Director of Security Assurance
Microsoft Corp.

This is not from Microsoft obviously as they noted and should be deleted asap.

These fake e-mails claim they are part of a new “experimental private version of an update for all Microsoft Windows OS users.” The e-mail instructs the end user to download an attachment, which is actually a malicious Trojan Horse program known as Win32/Haxdoor.  This software records sensitive information such as passwords and credit card numbers and sends this data back to the attackers who are running the scam.

In a recent blog posting on the scam Microsoft spokesman Christopher Budd, commented, “As a matter of company policy, Microsoft will never send you an executable attachment.”  The only e-mails Microsoft does send out are to users who have opted-in to receive security notification by e-mails from TechNet Security Center and these emails are in plain text and never contain any sort of attachment.

Logging into the affiliate control panel I was immediately impressed with the technology and detail.  Everything you need to run a successful affiliate marketing campaign is immediately at your disposal in an aesthetically pleasing layout.

Pepperjam has secured some HUGE merchant/retailer names.  Looking through their list of advertisers you’ll see many of the same wildly popular advertisers you love to promote and some interesting new advertisers in very specialized niche markets you may not be familiar with like Andy’s Airplanes.

In my opinion one of the best features of this affiliate network is pepperjamADS.

“pepperjamADS is an affiliate marketing widget that you can use to serve customized contextual ads from one or multiple Pepperjam Network advertisers at the same time. The ad units come in various shapes and sizes. You can mix and mash ads from any of your merchant partners. For instance, you can create a fashion widget by selecting various ads from multiple fashion merchants. Likewise, you can create a specific widget with ads from any one merchant.”

If you haven’t already signed up for the Pepperjam Network…what are you waiting for?  Pepperjam’s 2008 Inc. 500 ranking is #70 with three-year revenue growth of 2,447.5%.  Pepperjam ranks as one of the top 100 fastest growing privately-held companies in the United States of America!

So when the dust settles and the bugs are worked out what will Microsoft do?  They’ve sat on their laurels long enough without major progressive improvements to Internet Explorer, so this move by Google shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.

Check out the below video courtesy of Chris Pirillo.

Operating systems are soon going the way of the DoDo.  But is Google really that close to moving your operating system online?

Make Money with Craigslist and Google Adsense

Craigslist is an online local advertising board, much like the little ads and notes found tacked on the community board at your local supermarket.  There is a Craiglist in most major communities in the United States and Canada.  On Craigslist, you can post items or services for sale.  You can also post wanted notices and advertise upcoming events.

There are two ways to make money with Craigslist: the direct way and the indirect way.  If you sell products or services through your blog or website, you can post items for sale in their appropriate categories and post a link back to your blog if people need more information.

Another method of making money using Craigslist is the indirect method. This is how you can make money with Craigslist and Google Adsense.

There is a forum section on Craigslist where participants can discuss just about anything.  If you become an active participant in the Craigslist forums, you can post your blog link in your signature line so that people are aware that it exists without the hard sell.  Along with the link to the blog, include a short phrase that explains what you are selling so that potential customers know why they need to click on the link.  Note that just like in any other forum, spamming Craigslist forums with links without participating in discussions is considered bad form and can get you banned from Craigslist.  Done correctly, however, promoting your products and services on Craigslist is a worthwhile marketing activity.

Posting an ad on Craigslist is easy.  Go to www.craigslist.com and select your state and the nearest city to you. Find the category that best describes your product or service.  Some categories are very specific and some are broad “catch-alls” where you can post a wider variety of items for sale.  If you are promoting an event on your blog such as a rock concert, there is a “Communities” space where you can list upcoming events, seminars, and other activities.

Make Money with Craigslist and Google Adsense with very little effort once the program is set up.  By combining both Craigslist and Google Adsense you can make even more money on your blog or website with targeted traffic.  Obviously you will make more money with Adsense the more people you have on the site.  You can drive traffic to your blog site with a Craigslist postings thereby increasing the chances that readers will see ads on your site that interest them.  This is no big secret but amazingly marketers still do not use this free marketing tool.

Making money with Craigslist and Google Adsense is easy and profitable. Once set up, these programs can be effective tools in your ethical marketing plan.

Over the last few months I noticed a decent increase in site traffic (along with some revenue) from this free advertising service:

Yep, nothing to quit your day job over but nevertheless a nice increase in web site traffic for virtually no work accept approving classified ads.  I figured this increase was coming from Yahoo! so I checked into the stats (like we all do) just a little bit more:

I have to admit I really wasn’t surprised to see that Google was still dominating Yahoo! in natural search referrals.  Even being positioned on the second page of Google is better than being listed on the first page of Yahoo!.

No sir, I’m not looking the gift horse in the mouth, it just never ceases to amaze me how powerful Google has become over the last 10 years it’’s been online.  No competition.

Most marketers deem viral marketing a myth, or an Internet folly that works once in a blue moon when an amazing product or web site turns up.

Realistically, viral marketing techniques can be applied to any type of web site, either big or small. These techniques can be used by anybody who is willing to put in the time put in use a few simple steps. Viral marketing that is done right can have amazing benefits, such as:

-build your brand or name recognition
-enhance your one way link popularity
-boost targeted traffic to your site
-automate your marketing attempts

Here are a few straightforward viral marketing techniques that you can try out on your web site, business, or product:

1. Spread the Word
Everyone has seen what word of mouth can do for all types of products. It is amazing what happens when people talk about a great gadget or movie and out of no where everybody knows all about it. It is in our human nature to tell everybody we know about any kind of amazing product we have found or bought. So, why not go ahead and take advantage of it?

Placing a straightforward “Tell a Friend” form on your web site is an easy way for your visitors to spread the word about your web site. Many internet marketers do not take advantage of this type of form. You can do the same thing to all of your newsletters, services, product, or any other aspect of your web site… at the end of all copies just add a few sentences asking nicely for your visitors to refer their friends if they found your service, site, or product helpful or useful.

2. Brand Your Site
It is very important to have some sort of logo on your product or web site. Branding all of your stuff is dire for people to take notice and become interested. Having a captivating brand name can be thought as a very “viral technique” within itself; so try to think of something that catches attention and has an original ring to it.

Branding gives people a clear picture of your product or site. People distinguish brands, so include your logo or brand on everything that is being produced from your business.

3. Ebooks
Knowledgeable marketers have sprung onto this new creation very quickly; they recognize the “viral” power that eBooks have to a business.

Ebooks are simply electronic documents that anyone can download from any type of web site and can be circulated around the web. Webmasters or marketers can also re-brand eBooks with their very own links. Ebooks that have high quality information get passed around the web extremely quickly and are amazing viral tools.

Anybody can go ahead and write their own eBook on the topic of their web site. For someone that is not writer savvy they can get permission to exploit a collection of articles that have already been written from the multiple article directories around the web. Two very popular article directories are: www.ezinearticles.com and www.goarticles.com. Software for eBook compiling is pretty cheap and you can usually find it for free on the internet.

4. Viral Marketing Software
Many effortless software applications and products can be extremely viral and are often handed around or downloaded via the internet by thousands every day. These products are always something that most user’s desire: organizers, ecalenders, link checking software, personal planners, and so on. Most are simple desktop goods that stay on the user’s computer desktop, which happens to b e the most important location in the marketing stadium.

The preeminent examples of viral marketing software always have the business’s logo, contact email, and sales message…. All include live links to each of the above…. Which happens to be conveniently displayed somewhere within the product. Software programs such as these can be extremely useful viral promotional devices that can expand quickly throughout the web.

5. RSS
RSS is the newest addition to viral marketing techniques. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it is an awesome viral marketing tool. RSS was originally used by many news crews to syndicate all of their news stories. It is also connected to Blogs since the use an RSS feed to hand out their content. RSS feeds that have a high quality are selected and put on display by a variety of different sites all over the internet.

If you have yet to gear up for RSS you should get started. You can simply use a site such as blogger.com (possessed by Google) which will provide you with a basic blog and RSS feed, so you can extend your product and/or message to targeted parties.

6. Video Seeding
Create videos utilizing popular video generation software such as Camtasia Studio.  Camtasa enables you to produce killer screen recording videos how to videos, product reviews, etc.  With an informative video posted (called seeding) to a popular video web site such as YouTube, MetCafe etc you can watch your traffic explode.

These are just a few viral marketing techniques out there that can help you increase your presence on the web, boost your traffic, and amplify your links. When used properly, these techniques will jump start your web site and spread it all over the internet and around the world.

While catching up with launching a slew of new unique content niche web sites, after my long deployment to Iraq, I came across www.TextBroker.com.  All I can say is WOW! After working with numerous other web publishing agencies, freelance web sites and ghost writer services nothing even comes close to the speed, efficiency and professionalism of of TextBroker.com custom articles.

With 100+ domains sitting in my Keyword Discovery account, with anywhere from 500-1000 long tail keywords mined in each, it can be EXTREMELY expensive and time consuming to generate and launch so many quality unique content web sites…without a full time staff of authors.

In the past I would use rentacoder.com and a few others but the the time it took to set up a project, accept a bid and receive the end product often took more time than I was willing to spend. The beauty of TextBroker.com is simply this:

1. You generate individual article marketing projects for each of your domains.
2. You set the article parameters for each individual project which includes: completion time frame, article length; the long tail keywords you want used for each individual article; submit a quick blurb indicating the overall feel of the articles; and choose the professionalism level from 1-5 of the particular project (5 being most professional but a little more expensive).
3. Then you just sit back and let TextBroker.com tell you when an article has been completed by one of their 100’s of authors thus allowing you to focus on more keyword research, marketing, etc.

No more waiting for individual authors to complete your project.  With TextBroker.com you have an army of authors at your disposal to knock out even your most daunting article marketing campaigns.  And, when you find extremely good authors (I’ve found quite a few so far) you can add them as favorites and directly submit them a new project.

If you haven’t tried this ghost writer service yet I highly recommend you give them a try.  Their flat rate fees are:

What Makes Them Even Cooler?

• 100% US Based Authors
• Direct Author/Client Messaging
• Exclusive rights to your content
• Articles reviewed by TextBroker .com staff for quality, grammatical errors, etc.
• Internet copyright-check of articles verified by CopyScape

Go test their service out right now on a small campaign you already know is a profitable niche or just have them write up some fresh articles for your preexisting site(s) to see if you like the results.  After that I’m pretty sure you’ll be hooked.  ;-)

Seriously, what would you rather be spending your time on?  Auction sites are great for software, eBooks, applications etc. but for articles I can’t think of a better solution (besides a personal staff on payroll) than www.TextBroker.com.  Cheers!

WOW, look at the e-mail I just received!  (Your spam checker probably saved you.)

Hi,

We’ve seen your website at http://www.top-affiliate.com/blog/ and we love it!
We see that your traffic rank is 191851
and your link popularity is 226.
Also, you have been online since 8/29/2004.

With that kind of traffic, we will pay you up to $4,800/month to advertise our links on your website.

If you’re interested, read our terms from this page: http://www.contactthem. com/affiliateLink

Sincerely,

“SPAM TEAM”
The ContactThem Network

So after having a good solid laugh at this e-mail curiosity got the best of me and off I wandered over to ContactThem to see what this nonsense was all about.

Once you get to the pitch page you find out that ContactThem (according to them) is the fastest growing program since Google Adwords.  Get out, surely you jest! But it gets better.  They also claim they are as viral as Hotmail.  Wow, that’s a pretty modest claim.  =)

Blah, blah, blah…blah, blah, blah…Oh wait a minute, what’s this asterisk?  Ahh, those were potential earnings!  You almost tricked me ContactThem!

Basically this spam and scam product is a lead generating software for, yep you guessed it, MULTI LEVEL MARKETING (MLM), which we all know preys on the new opportunity seeker or affiliate marketer.  This software extracts details out of numerous databases and allows you to do a mass mailing with the gleaned personalized information.  Talk about your laser targeted leads, LOL!

Since I really despise MLM I wanted to see who was responsible for this debacle.  Ahh it makes sense now….it’s Stephan Ducharme the notorious FreeAdGuru who’s claim to fame was repackaging free traffic generating methods as “secrets” almost 10 years ago.

Evidently these spam and scam e-mails have been flying around since late February ‘08 when I was over in Iraq so this is probably old news to most.  However, hopefully someone will read this and be saved from the hype and nonsense still flying around this particular “offer” and be more inquisitive on future too-good-to-be-true offers.

Steer clear people and update your spam filters.  ;-)

If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years…Goowy Media, Inc. develops innovative online products and services that provide simple, intuitive tools for managing your digital life and expressing yourself on the web.  Their most popular products are yourminus.com and goowy webtop

This progressive move by AOL enables web publishers, like you and me, to generate additional revenue from a combination of affiliate, widget and viral marketing.  It will be exciting to see how Platform-A advertisers integrate/syndicate this new capability into their customized widgets for your blog, website, and even your desktop!  Very cool stuff indeed.

For more than a little while now I haven’t had too many good things to say about these blasted Widgets!  They seemed to just take up real advertising space and bleed my hard-earned web traffic.  However, I will gladly test these viral advertiser generated widgets out on my network of blogs/sites so my visitors and customers can snatch them up and redistribute them to the far corners of the Web.  Just think about the applications…MySpace, FaceBook, etc.

Lynda Clarizio, President of Platform-A states, “This solution combines the best of affiliate and widget advertising in a solution that benefits publishers and advertisers alike.  Publisher revenue potential, brand exposure for the advertiser, and potential conversions grow virally each time the widget is downloaded by a consumer.”

I agree Lynda!  Now this is what we collectively mean by the moniker Web 2.0 people!

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