Paying for fake reviews and disguised blog post advertorials is wrong. It’s lying to people, plain and simple. If your company does it, you’re evil, untrustworthy, and stupid. Why risk your brand reputation and FTC prosecution for a back-alley marketing stunt? Good news: Researchers from the University of Victoria have designed and validated a detection [...]
Tag Archives: ethics
Don’t you just want to go to their office and beat these thieves senseless?
Take a look at this mailer from a company called Naviss that specializes in mass-scale fraud. Everything about this letter is designed to make you think that it is either a recall notice from your car manufacturer or a government warning. It is designed to steal money from innocent, unsuspecting good people.
When it makes sense to blog about a free sample
In my previous post, I blogged about a free headset that was sent to me by an old friend. Sure, he got some promotional benefit out of it — but I wasn’t blogging to send him business, to thank him, or as a quid-pro-quo. I wrote the blog post because it met the editorial standards [...]
Should we forgive the sleazy behavior once companies get famous?
Many famous dot-coms did a lot of sleazy, spammy things in their early days. AOL, Microsoft, and other major players in the online advertising industry bought and absorbed some very ugly promoters of pop-ups, spam, and deceptive ad practices. Today, startup Thumbtack is shamelessly harvesting emails off of Craigslist and mass-spamming fake personal emails to [...]
Ethical disclosure is absurdly easy — learn how
We’re required to disclose any form of compensation when writing a blog post, which has led to all sorts of stresses, excuses, legal discussion, and bloviating by bloggers. It’s really easy to do proper, simple, legally-compliant disclosure: Just write a sentence at the start of each post explaining your relationship to whomever is compensating you [...]
Apologize like you mean it
How many times do you have a problem with a company and all you want is an apology. And they say everything but “I’m sorry.” When you screw up: Take responsibility. Apologize for real. No mealy, bullshit, weasel words, like “we’re sorry that you feel that way.” Do it fast. Here’s a great example from [...]
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