Improving Life Via Watching http://ecorner.stanford.edu/

Over the last few months I’ve watched many episodes at http://ecorner.stanford.edu/ and have come away with usable information. For example I learned about Square and Dropbox there and now use both of them. Sure many of the discussions are irritating but still the signal to noise ratio is quite good. 

Internet Marketing Scams

I just got off the phone with an internet marketing company. It was quite the experience. She had called the week before to set up an appointment. She said at that time totally innocent sincere statements. That her company would improve in a measurable way the rankings on the search engines and payment would be based on performance. So I agreed and she said her staff would work on it and be prepared to demonstrate the results if I’d be willing to hire them.

Today she called back and had me log in to her site where she could interactively demonstrate. The first problem was her demonstration software only worked with flash. Flash that only worked on windows and the macintosh. She was out of her depth figuring that out and resorted to trying to cover her tracks by asking about personal things. I went to a windows machine and downloaded the appropriate plugins. The second problem was her phone connection and internet speed. Her voice kept coming and going. And the flash demonstration she was giving was always laggy. I endured as she read through her script which she insisted wasn’t a script.

When she finally got past the scripted fluff it turned out she wanted to use google advertising. I told her I had strong feelings against buying advertising. All those horror stories about having to pay for each click on the google advert goes against my nature. I want to pay for results only. I do not want to pay a dollar or something per click and find out the clicks are being done by an automated program with a few thousand IP addresses at its disposal.

Her second solution was to monitor each advertising campaign with different telephone numbers. The numbers would be under their control. Tying me for all eternity to their company. Or risk losing customers that want to call me back a few years from now only to find the number in their address book no longer goes to my company. (Wouldn’t faze me at all if they used “my” numbers for a future competition’s campaign.) I told her again I was not up for these types of ideas where I tie my future financial well being, if they are even being honest, to them. Even if they were being honest they would be in a position to increase prices and I would be forced to go along with them or lose my customer base.

The next solution was to start another website, a parallel website, which would have up to 20 pages where they would write and update new material. Basically putting me under their thumb again. They’d have the site and I’d have to be giving them money.

I told her that was the third and final “solution”, hung up, and marked her number to be sent directly to “the number you have dialed is no longer in service, if you feel you have reached …” (I do that a lot.) I figured it was like dealing with the proverbial devil. Given enough time she’d present a solution that I wouldn’t see through, accept it, and then I’d be really really sorry.

These marketing tactics should be criminalized. Perhaps I should go buy some books on the subject so I can assign names to each of these, and the hundreds of others I haven’t encountered, dirty rotten no-good underhanded tactics.