Series On Ethics In Internet Marketing - Lesson #1:
How Social Networking Is Being Used Against You

The explosion of social networking and social media sites has been a very welcome addition to the marketing landscape. It has been especially welcomed by those marketers looking to take advantage of a tremendous wealth of (typically) targeted traffic that comes from a properly positioned social media campaign.

However, with every way of ethically working within a medium there is always going to be 2 or 3 ways of unethically abusing a system. Typically these abuses are used to either enhance the users position, brand, or traffic, or, and even more deceptively, and what were going to touch on here, attempt to tarnish, defame, or otherwise destroy the competition through inflammatory, insidious, and down right untruthful actions.

Knowing how certain individuals and companies are attempting to sabotage you and your marketing efforts gives you an edge to help potentially stem the onslaught that may come your way.

The Setup
Social networking sites by their very nature are based on the popularity principle. The more “votes” a topic or post receives the higher it is moved up the proverbial chain. The ultimate goal of course being to reach the home page of said social networking site. This is of course not news and of course abusing social mediums is not new. Think back not too long ago when every other post on many of the web development / seo forums were individuals / companies guaranteeing to get your post on the front page of DIGG, Reddit, etc…

While this has its own post written all over it (in regards to the ethics of marketing online) it is merely one of the potential vehicles being abused by unscrupulous marketers to try and defame their competition. Now imagine those same methods being used to promote and distribute defaming or even simply libelous information about you or your company and what impact they could ultimately have on you and your reputation.

A great example would be from CNN’s ireport website where someone using this social network site created a post in regards to Apple’s Steve Jobs having a heart attack. This information turned out to be completely false, but the damage was done to thousands when Apples stock took a huge hit. While the stock recovered, it was still down overall for the day. It is also under SEC investigation as some made a LOT of money with a crash of that sort.

Not everyone is as large as Apple and can have everything so easily corrected. Case in point one of my clients, a prominent fishing forum, who got caught in the cross fire, TWICE, by a very unscrupulous competitor.

The first time had to do with the site ILLEGALLY registering copyrighted domain names that were protected by not only cybersquatting laws, but intellectual property laws as well. After this was discovered and efforts were put under way to recover the domains, the first site we’ll call them the “unethical ones” started an anti social networking campaign that included getting this top ranked fishing forum (my client) listed as an adult site and not open to public on sites like aboutus.org. (See Screen Shot Below).

These are just a few of the different examples I have personally witnessed of the benefits of the social networking world being bent and abused by those who whose sense of ethics may not be so much on the up and up. It is also the first in many lessons of what to look out for when you’re marketing yourself or your company online.

Remember while it is critical to concentrate on building your good press, you need to keep an ever vigilant eye to the abuse of social networking that is now more than ever becoming ever so common.