At 9:10 AM 2/27/95, Neil Ruggles wrote:
>>Pricing info should only be posted by persons without a conflict of
>>interest and only in clearly labelled, easily deleted forms.
>
>Dave, third parties who post supposedly unbiased pricing info or favorable
>reviews of a vendor may or may not be associated with the vendors. It can
>be pretty hard to tell the difference between a serious fan of a given
>product and a paid professional promoter. Especially since the promoter
>gets paid to be clever.
Neil, I've not yet encountered anyone who was a decoy advertiser for a
company on any list, and almost always, any infomation provided in the
course of a discussion is balanced and includes pros & cons. The only
"product advertising" I've seen on lists is spamming by unethical weasels.
You must be confusing the Internet I work on with some ideal of an Internet
that tolerates the same sort of crass commercialism that the TV networks
allow (fake "consumer advocate panels," "infomercials," etc.).
Furthermore, if you'll allow me to play Angel's Advocate a moment longer,
when people mention commercial products on a list, I expect them to
explicitly state that they don't have any financial interest in the company
- I always do myself when I mention anything. If they don't state as much,
and they endore a product, then they're not being "clever," they're
practicing "fraud." Not only that, they're practicing fraud in a medium
where thay can be easily traced, which is the inverse of clever.
>Here is a quote I picked today (2/27) off a journalism list I subscribe to:
>
>>BTW, those of you on this list might be interested to know that when I gave
>>a speech recently on Internet marketing, one of the attendees told me
>>privately that "We have gotten a lot of business off the Net. We have
>>chosen about five of our most passionate, positive end-users to lurk for us
>>and respond positively to messages about us. We pay them for this." These
>>users are not revealing their financial arrangement with the vendor as they
>>post their positive comments/recommendations.
That's plain unethical. You should inform them of this privately and see
what their response is. The "lurkers" who do this for them probably
practice forms of fraud or other criminal activities in other parts of
their lives, and there's no way to protect against this without
establishing a "police force" on the net, something I'm loathe to do.
Ethics is a system of beliefs and practices which everyone should agree to
support or no-one will benefit from them.
>I'm curious whether you would rather have a vendor "sneak" their promotions
>into your list by having a third party say good things about them, or have
>the promotions clearly identified as as such?
You don't offer me much of a choice here, so my answer is "neither one." I
still don't see how a vendor could "sneak" promotions onto a list if I
didn't allow promotions on the list, without either violating the rules of
the list they agreed to when they became a subscriber (they'd get one shot
off and be dropped), or by practicing fraud as described above (they might
eventually be visited by the real Police if discovered). If people on a
list mention something in passing while discussing a topic ("yeah, and
these random number generator chips from OBFUSCO, Inc. are perfect for
those elliptical curve crypto functions") I'd expect them to follow basic
netiquette and mention that they had no financial interest in OBFUSCO, Inc.
FYI, I've had discussions at conferences with folks from the FBI's Computer
Crime squad who'd like to meet your business aquiaintenances and discuss
their methods with them in a poorly-lit room. Their days pulling that sort
of fraud are numbered.
I have no problem with one or two lines of header information (it can be
filtered or switched off pretty easily, and it's no business of mine what
you paint on your car as much as it might offend me to look at it in
traffic), but I think that lists of an academic nature, which is what I'd
be managing, are clearly NOT the place for commercial promotion.
Again, there are other ways for such commercial interests to have a place
on the net that people _choose_ to visit (URLs, Gopher and FTP sites,
etc.). With all the manifold ways to flog products electronically, can't
public relations and marketing people be more creative than "putting up
billboards in classrooms?" Or must they shove their pap in our faces no
matter where we go? I speak of others here, of course: I'm sure this
doesn't apply to a thoughtful person like yourself, who's at least asking
about the Right Thing from a list-manager's perspective.
dave
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