"Gasp! How dare your company has more to pay for marketing than my company does!"
That seems to be the theme for this morning to me. I was mindlessly reading my way through a forum and stumbled across a bit of mindless reading where a website was apparently grousing because their competitor site had paid for advertising on blogs. We'll call them Site 1 and Site 2 (or should that be Thing 1 and Thing 2? ::nods to Dr. Seuss).. anyway, our little story -
Site 1 went to an advertising market and they spent some of their money on paying people to go and look at their website and say how they felt about it. Now, I am presuming that they really did not want to spend their money on bad vibes, so they probably asked that only people that liked their site accept their proposal for paying folks. All very reasonable.
Site 2 went out on a walk-a-bout to see what their competition was up to and discovered one, or more, of the paid for referrals to Site 1. Gasp! They spent money on bringing in people and on potentially raising their Google Ranking! Oh man, how could Site 1 do something like that to Site 2? What was Site 2 to do? They did not want to spend their marketing budget on such things, maybe they did not even *have* a marketing budget. What to do what to do. The only thing Site 2 could do, or so it seemed to Site 2, was to start a smear campaign. So that's what they did.
Site 2 started writing about how awful it was that Site 1 had paid for marketing, how horrible of a thing it was for them to have spent money on something that Site 2 could not afford and set out misleading quotes to make it appear as though Google would penalize the site severely for what Site 2 claimed was a bad thing.
But... was it? Did Site 1 truly do anything wrong? I do not recall the particulars off the top of my head, but I do clearly recall something about this being asked of the head gurus at the major places, like Google and Yahoo and etcetera, at a conference somewhere and the response was a fairly universal "Why should we penalize someone, blogger or advertiser, for that?" Even the FCC says that it is perfectly fine to do, so why is Site 2 up in arms?
::shrug:: I don't know. Their marketing budget is not as good as Site 1's? What would they do if Site 1 ran a television campaign? I guess my point here is, rather than smear your competition for being able to take advantage of marketing promotions that you can't, just work that much harder at the ones you can take advantage of. Don't smear the competition, and those promoting it, for doing something perfectly fair and acceptable. Don't trying to make it look like it was an underhanded trick just because you could not also make use of that marketing tactic.
Site 1 went to an advertising market and they spent some of their money on paying people to go and look at their website and say how they felt about it. Now, I am presuming that they really did not want to spend their money on bad vibes, so they probably asked that only people that liked their site accept their proposal for paying folks. All very reasonable.
Site 2 went out on a walk-a-bout to see what their competition was up to and discovered one, or more, of the paid for referrals to Site 1. Gasp! They spent money on bringing in people and on potentially raising their Google Ranking! Oh man, how could Site 1 do something like that to Site 2? What was Site 2 to do? They did not want to spend their marketing budget on such things, maybe they did not even *have* a marketing budget. What to do what to do. The only thing Site 2 could do, or so it seemed to Site 2, was to start a smear campaign. So that's what they did.
Site 2 started writing about how awful it was that Site 1 had paid for marketing, how horrible of a thing it was for them to have spent money on something that Site 2 could not afford and set out misleading quotes to make it appear as though Google would penalize the site severely for what Site 2 claimed was a bad thing.
But... was it? Did Site 1 truly do anything wrong? I do not recall the particulars off the top of my head, but I do clearly recall something about this being asked of the head gurus at the major places, like Google and Yahoo and etcetera, at a conference somewhere and the response was a fairly universal "Why should we penalize someone, blogger or advertiser, for that?" Even the FCC says that it is perfectly fine to do, so why is Site 2 up in arms?
::shrug:: I don't know. Their marketing budget is not as good as Site 1's? What would they do if Site 1 ran a television campaign? I guess my point here is, rather than smear your competition for being able to take advantage of marketing promotions that you can't, just work that much harder at the ones you can take advantage of. Don't smear the competition, and those promoting it, for doing something perfectly fair and acceptable. Don't trying to make it look like it was an underhanded trick just because you could not also make use of that marketing tactic.
posted by Sandra at 7:25 AM
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