The ability for all of us to publish on the social web — to have a voice — is among the most profound sociological, economic, and political developments of our lifetime. It gives us the power to elevate a little boy from Canada to an international singing superstar or to unite a group of people to tear down a dictatorship.

This democratization of power is the central theme of my new book, Return On Influence.  This new power is breathtaking and beautiful. It is inspirational and revolutionary. And, it can be deadly.

We have all seen how social media can be used to bully and destroy. A few months ago on {grow} Leslie Lewis told the story of how her career was destroyed by a social media stalker.  A year ago, a student at Rutgers (where I teach) killed himself after Internet humiliation.

Last week, I was also in a position to use social media power to destroy.

My wife had been admitted to a local hospital for a routine procedure.  We experienced the usual delays and administrative foul-ups (had wrong name on her bracelet!) that we have come to expect from the medical profession but nothing prepared me for the horror I was about to experience.

When I was called to her recovery room (where she was still asleep), I could not believe my eyes. The room was filthy. The trash can was filled with tubes and debris from another patient’s procedure. There was trash all over the floor — paper, a used drinking straw, and pieces of some strange green organic material. Worst of all, there were drops of blood (not hers!) across the floor. I was disgusted and outraged. These were like the conditions I have heard about from missionary doctors working in a Third World country.

I took out my phone and took both pictures and video to document the mess … with my wife sleeping peacefully in the middle of it. Nobody would believe this.

I finally was able to flag down an attendant and angrily pointed out the problem. Her response was “Oh … I didn’t see that.”

Perhaps you could overlook a clear drinking straw on a white floor, but certainly not bright red blood drops or a trash can overflowing with used plastic tubes.

When the surgeon came in, I explained how repulsed I was … and I was still feeling ill about the unsanitary conditions even after the blood was wiped up (with a wet paper towel). He said that he would report it and that I would be getting a call from the hospital administration.

Twenty-four hours later I had not received a call and I was still seething.  My adrenaline was saying “post the video.” Instead, I posted a query on Facebook and asked the world what they would do. The recommendations ranged from “keep it in-house” to “get the media involved.”

I called the patient advocate and reached a voice recording, notifying me that she was only available during certain business hours. I also tried to leave a request through the hospital website but the form was broken and I just got an error message.

Later that day, I received a return call from the patient advocate. She was professional and apologetic and said she would investigate the situation.

Two days after this discussion, my wife got a call of apology from the head of the department and a letter from the patient advocate. And that’s how it stands.

This episode represented the first time in my life that I had a “social media voice” go off in my head … “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? I HAVE A VOICE!”  I knew that I could have humiliated this hospital on the evening news … maybe even caused an investigation of some kind. Perhaps I should have.

But whether you agree with my decision or not, I hope you will consider this advice: If you ever get into a situation where you can use your social media power to destroy, don’t let adrenaline make the decision for you.  That’s how people are getting hurt and humiliated these days.

When I let the adrenaline subside, I thought about the situation and realized that if I went public with this, the most likely outcome would be that some hourly-wage attendant would lose her job. I would probably be hurting a family more than a hospital.  That is not what I’m about. That was not the right decision for me.

Every day I see destruction, hate, and viciousness on the web from people who can’t keep their adrenaline in check.  The social web is a place of stunning beauty and terrible darkness … just like the human race I suppose.

I’ll open myself and my actions to public scrutiny because this is an important topic we are all likely to face at some point. Did I do enough as a civic duty in this case?  What would you do if you were in a position to use social media to destroy?

With your kind support, {grow} has become a fairly popular blog. With this distinction, I’m deluged with requests to do sponsored posts (companies offering to pay for their promotional content to show up as a blog post).

The scams seem to be getting more aggressive and extreme and I recently pointed out the example of a guy who flat-out lied to me just to get a back-link on this blog.  It makes me wonder … if there are so many people trying to pay me to turn {grow} into their advertisement, they must be having enough success to make it worth their while, right?

There must be a critical mass of influential bloggers out there accepting money for blog posts, otherwise these people would go away!

What follows is a word-for-word transcript of messages exchanged between myself and an actual company seeking a paid placement on {grow}.  I’ve only changed the real name of the writer and her company because I don’t need to embarass this person …

Hello Mark!

I am interested in content advertising opportunities on your site, Schaefer Marketing Solutions,because of its great pool of write-ups.

By the way, this is Susan Rafstein and I work for Synchristic Hosting.com.

Our company is one of the most reliable guides for webmasters and website development in the market. We offer in-depth reviews of various hosting providers and other web-related tutorials.

Are you interested?

Susan

Susan,

Thanks for connecting with me.

If I am reading your inquiry correctly, you are looking to advertise on my blog. Specifically, what do you have in mind?

Mark

Hi Mark!

You got that right. Actually, I’m looking for a possibility if you can do a review of our company, Synchristic Hosting.com. Tell me how much would it cost us for you to publish the review in the blog area of your website.

Hoping you’ll consider.

Susan

Susan,

Maybe this appears old-fashioned but I think being paid to do a positive review is unethical.

Mark

Mark,

I’m sorry if that didn’t sound right to you Mark. That was just merely a suggestion–didn’t say that the review is gonna lean towards the positive side. But I bet that incase you do you it, we will do good.

Anyway, what about we do a guest post?

Susan

Susan,

In all due respect, you are approaching this “pitch” in a disastrous way.

If I am unwilling to be paid to promote your company through a blog post, why would I do it for free? And how does one “review” a hosting company any way?

I have built my blog and my community on excellent content and I’ve built trust, in part,  by not allowing outside companies to convert these great people into sales leads.

Occasionally I do have guest posts from individuals who are active members in the community. I invite them to do posts because they have great ideas or to help them get some exposure for their own work.

However, I’ve never heard of you or your company before so it’s unlikely that I would unleash you on a community of people who have also become my friends.

I would invite you to read my blog, get to know the folks around here, and show up through comments before asking me to promote your content.

This is probably the same reaction you will receive from other trustworthy bloggers, or at least I hope so!  If you do a search on “how to pitch to bloggers” I think you will get much of the same advice I’m providing here.

Best wishes, Mark

Hi Mark!

Again, my apologies if I’m sounding a bit off in your standards. Thanks for the advice and I will take note of that.

I’ve been doing this for quite some time now and honestly, you’re the only one who had that reaction. But there’s a first time for everything, right?

Anyway, I’m concluding this as a negative response from you. Thanks for your time.

Susan

P.S.: Just in case you change your mind, you can send me an email anytime.

Another variation on paid content is paying for backlinks.  I am routinely being offered $100 per link, even if I sneak them into old blog posts.  And while it’s unlikely that many people would ever know about this, I would know about it and it seems … unethical.  Or is it?  Does anybody out there really care any more or are most bloggers link whores?

I’m also seeing a growing number of bloggers routinely featuring their customer in blog posts. Are they directly or indirectly being paid for these posts and links, or simply being polite? Do blog readers notice this like I do? Do they care? Are we just getting numb to it? Or is it smart business?

When I get inquiries like the one above, I wonder if I am that much out of step with the times compared to other bloggers.  Am I simply idealistic?  Stupid?  Surely I can’t be the only one taking a stand on this kind of graft, right?  What do you think?  Would you take the money?

I

I’m a social media guy.  I’ve been blogging for six years and have been on Facebook since its beginning in France.  I’m very familiar with how Facebook has evolved. So, I guess you could say I “get it,” but to be honest, even to somebody like me, Facebook has become too complicated, and even frightening.

I’ve found myself thinking that even the most die-hard users must also find Facebook’s changes — while esthetically appealing — incredibly confusing.

Following your Facebook feed can become a part-time job! You can spend a whole night plowing through your recent timeline updates, hiding what you don’t want to see, configuring all of your privacy settings, reconfiguring who has access to each and every photos album … it is starting to feel like you are becoming your own website administrator.

When you realize that Facebook can remove all of the filters that you had previously defined and dig up old photos albums that you had deleted from your profile, you quickly realize how much trust you’ve put into this machine — and there is nothing you can do about it but stop using it.

For me, the changes with Facebook have made make me shudder, especially when I start thinking through some of the implications of the new direction they are taking.

Facebook ubiquity

Facebook’s announcements last week imply that EVERYTHING we do, say, listen to, eat, work on, play on … every detail of our lives .. will be shared, stored, and then dissected at the discretion of the Facebook algorithms.  You might be thinking : “Wake up! There is nothing new, you’ve got to accept that anything online can be made public at any moment — even an e-mail.”

But having the ambition to display the whole life of their users is just insane.  Take Spotify, for example!  Sharing the music you’re listening to seems great, right?  Just put yourself in the shoes of a shy 16-year-old guy; what is he going to do to impress others and fit in?   He’s going to listen to the same music that everyone else is listening to, so as not to seem “weird” at all via his very public Facebook profile.

Imagine that he may stop listening to what he really likes because he will be ashamed to share his real taste in music, unless he is one of the rare users that figures out how to stop the feed from Spotify to Facebook.

Now take this concept and duplicate it for tastes in TV, movies, places to eat … maybe with just about everything.

There’s a significant difference in saying “I’m fan of” something to look cool versus having a machine checking everything that you actually do in real time. Big Brother? We’ve been talking about him for years and it seems like he truly is here.

Facebook is on track to homogenize society, which conversely, and ironically, may “weaken” the database that Facebook is building and the advertising targeting that they are offering!

We are boiling ourselves

Did you ever hear the story about the frog? If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will jump out right away; the frog doesn’t want to die. If you put a frog in a pot of colder water, though, and slowly heat the water, the frog will stay until it dies (There are actual examples of this on YouTube if you really want to see that this is true).

We are frogs being boiled by Facebook. If Facebook had had the same privacy settings when it first started, people wouldn’t have joined or wouldn’t have joined for the same reasons. Now that they have, they stay and just let Facebook keep doing as it will.

We all have heard so many people say: “I’m going to delete my profile”, “Facebook is evil”, but yet they still seem to be on Facebook…

With the arrival of Timeline though, maybe this is a tipping point.  My friend Loic recently explained on his blog how his 16-year-old son decided to delete everything from his profile because he was afraid of sharing his life details, especially when people can go back to the very first things he did or put on Facebook.

Loic’s son is not alone; I’ve already heard the same story from multiple other people and friends that are deleting everything or something, clearly a sign of intrusiveness gone too far…

Perhaps the answer to this dilemma is in China.

Facebook is prominent most places in the world EXCEPT for China (and Russia). Part of this is because of China’s censorship and national protectionism, but it is also because Chinese social networks are very different.  When I was in China to understand how and which social media networks work there, I quickly discovered that their huge success is mainly due to one thing : anonymity!

When thinking about the future of social networks, it is impossible not to think about China and the way its social networks could change how we interact …

If Facebook could move to other countries, could Chinese social media platforms, with their elegant emphasis on anonymity, come into the Western World?

I think that we could see a backlash and a strong return to anonymity on the web because people love sharing their real lives, real stories, real fun, real everything without wondering about personal branding, or — wondering who is watching.

Any way, I can’t help but admire how much simpler and liberating our online experience would be — especially for youth — if we had a simple social networking platform that allowed anonymity.

What do you think? Is the trade-offs worth it?  Or, will you happily continue to feed information into the machine?

Gregory Pouy is a marketing professional who blogs at Greg from Paris. He also has created a very useful eBook on The Future of Commerce.  Follow him on Twitter at @gregfromparis.

I’ve started and trashed this article at least six times.

As you will see, I have my reasons to be conflicted about publishing it. Yet I can’t deny this gnawing feeling of disenchantment about the social web that seems to be also reflected in so many other blog posts I have read recently.

I am a positive person.  I want to lift people up. But at this moment, I can’t be “positive” and also be “honest.” I need to write about social media sewage for a moment. If you make it to the end of the article, it gets better!

There are three underlying economic drivers of social media that are creating desperate and increasingly unethical practices that are turning the social media space into a cesspool.

The first is search engine page rank, a business practice largely built on deception.  I know there is much more to it than that (spare me the flaming comments) but face it, billions of dollars are spent each year in an effort to deceive Google.  Those who do the best job become rich and are awarded rockstar status. On an almost daily basis, people make offers to me to participate in their complex SEO ruses.  I recently told the story of a person lying to me (and other bloggers) to get a single link to their website.

Related to SEO is the battle against spam comments on my blog. These comments, using increasingly sophisticated ploys, are meant to provide a back link to a website or trick us into clicking on a link.  Can you imagine that you and I are in a business where human beings  are creating bots and building Third World sweats shops with the goal of getting you to click on a link for black market Viagra or worse? What kind of a person can wake up each day and be happy with that kind of a career?

I have been spending so much time purging porn-purveyors and MLM link-builders from my Twitter stream that I have now assigned a virtual assistant to the task.  That’s right.  I work in an industry where I have to pay an employee to keep pornographers away from me.

A second economic driver on the web is content.  In an industry where content is power, people routinely steal and publish my original work – word for word — because that is easier and cheaper to do than creating their own material.  Last week a young and promising blogger asked, “What do I do when somebody steals my content?”  Unless you want to dedicate your life to chasing ghosts, the answer is “nothing.”  I have given up.

Not only are people routinely stealing my content to promote ideals and businesses I despise, even my fellow bloggers think nothing of taking content from others, without license or permission, to promote their own commercial efforts.  In the “real world” this would be a cause for a law suit. On the blogosphere it is celebrated as a best practice.

Another major economic driver on the Internet is social proof.  By this I mean the numbers and badges — like number of Twitter followers or Klout scores – that provide a shortcut assessment of authority.  In real life, we can actually meet people, watch them in a meeting, or observe the college degrees on their walls that create an impression of authority.  On the social web, we usually only have shortcuts – social proof – to serve this purpose. If you immerse yourself in the blogosphere you will quickly learn that social proof can be a more important source of influence than actual education, experience, or accomplishment.  Mitch Joel recently remarked in his podcast that it seems “dangerous” to him that the least experienced people on the social web seem to carry the most authority, largely by racking up social proof.

On the Internet, it is far too easy to become a guru. The entry barriers to being a social media marketer are so low that I recently met with a young man who had never taken a marketing class, never had a marketing job, never worked in sales — in fact, had not had a job of any kind since graduating from high school — and is now representing himself as a social media expert based on fake badges he had plunked down on his website.

Of course this is ridiculous but also commonplace.  Can you imagine somebody in this same situation advertising themselves as an “engineer,” or an “accountant,” or a “professional athlete?”  Twitter followers, Facebook likes, positive reviews, Google “plusses” — the most valued commodities of social proof — can all be purchased on eBay. You can certainly fake your way into our profession like no other.

And then something happened …

I don’t want to sound like a “victim” in all of this, but the fact is that if you are immersed in the social web, corruption is foisted upon all of us at almost every turn. If you examine our working conditions objectively, a large part of the economic value delivered by the social web is being created through deception, stealing, gaming the system, and faking your way to glory.  It’s enough to make you stop and think … and maybe just stop all together.

But just as I was ready to publish this article, something really weird happened.

I don’t spend a lot of time checking my Google Analytics but I decided to look at the keywords people were using to find my blog last month. Here is what I found:

This made my heart skip a beat.

I can’t explain this connection at all but in the last 30 days, 175 people typed a single word into Google — “hope” — and landed on this blog.  It was probably the precise message I needed to see at this disheartening moment in my career.

Sure the social web can be a strange place. But it has also given a lot to me.  Thousands of connections, hundred of friends, dozens of customers and partners and wonderful career opportunities.  Exactly one year ago I wrote a post called The Spirituality of Social Media and today I’m being whiny and cranky.  Maybe I’ve fallen down on the job a little since then but I guess that’s part of human nature too.  There is something to be said for enduring and prevailing.  Endurance creates character, and character creates hope.

When you get down to it, we can only impact our own little sliver of the world, and for me that’s {grow}.  Sometimes I do get tired of the ugliness, but you know, it can be different, a least here.  People doing a search for “hope” … and finding me. Wow.  That’s a kick in the pants. I’ve tried to lift up many other people over the years and now I maybe I need to lift myself … endure … prevail … and get back to the job of dispensing hope.

What do you think?  Will you join me?

Earlier this year I was approached by a guy named David Murton to do a guest post for {grow}.  I would say I get at least 2-3 requests like this every day.  The ones from obvious spammers or people trying to get product placements are typically easy to spot but David seemed sincere in his request to get exposure for his writing.

I didn’t know him and responded that guest posts are reserved for people who are active in the community. If somebody is active in the comment section or makes a reasonable attempt to connect with me on Twitter, I’ll certainly support community members in any way I can, including a guest post opportunity if appropriate.

David started showing up in my conversation stream so when I received a list of possible blog post ideas from him I was receptive. The ideas seemed unexceptional and I challenged him to dig deep and come up with a post that only he could write … the advice I give to every blogger, in fact.

Forsooth, the post arrives

A few days later, I received a finished post with a note explaining that he took my advice and ”took a risk” with his writing. The post was highly original — in the form of a Shakespearean play. I thought it was too long so I challenged him to tighten it up a bit. He was a little defensive, wanting to protect the integrity of his writing, but did a good job on the final product.

I ran the post, “A Classic Take on Social Media,” April 8 with his requested backlink to his online business cleverly embedded in the copy. The post received several nice compliments from readers. His response in the comment section: ”Glad you liked the post, it was a real pleasure preparing this one!”

That was the last I thought about it until last week when I received a cryptic comment on this now four-month-old post.  “I’m glad most of you liked the post.  I’m the guy who really wrote it.  My name is William Harwood and I was paid $50 for it.”

I contacted Mr. Harwood and said that if he was claiming that David Murton was fraudulent, he better back it up.  He folllowed with more than 20 emails, proving the authenticity of his piece and exposing at least six other examples where David Murton had claimed authorship of a post that was not his own work on various blogs. He also presented an example where David’s business partner seemed to have similarly duped Ari Herzog, a frequent commenter on {grow} and a blogger I admire.

Ultimate douche-baggery?

As I pieced together the facts, here is what appeared to have occurred. William had been employed as a freelancer to provide content to Skyvision Enterprises, a company involved in a number of SEO services including building backlinks through well-placed content. Mr. Murton purchased content from this company but presented it to me, and apparently other bloggers, as his original material.

When William Harwood googled his writing to see if it had been used anywhere, he found David taking credit for the ghost-written work, which he characterized as the ultimate “douche baggery.”  Although he had been paid for his work, he understood it was to be used anonymously in corporate blogs and publications.

I spoke to one of the owners of Skyvision, Greg Asseff, and he seemed sensitive to the situation and apologetic. His job, he explained, was to match business needs with content but what happened after that was out of his control.

I also reached out to David Murton, and after several days, I received an email explaining “I don’t try to mislead anyone, especially people that I work with. As you can see in William’s comment, he freely offers that he was paid for writing this article – I never tried to deceive or take advantage of anyone.”

I responded, with this request:  “Here is all I need to know. Why is it Ok for you to present this to me as your original writing — and take credit for it as your original writing — when it clearly was not? Do you think this is an honest business practice? Is it worth deceiving me — and apparently many others — to get a link?”

I have not received a reply.

The ghost blogging debate

I’m actually OK with ghost blogging under certain circumstances. I think it fills an important role for busy executives (especially those who are not good writers) and the community explored that topic in the post Can you out-source authenticity?  I also had a lively debate with Mitch Joel about it.

The community feedback from these dialogues helped create an outstanding list of best practices for ghost blogging .

So I’m not saying ghost blogging in our world of content marketing is wrong per se, especially with the guidelines around transparency provided in these posts.

But here’s the one principle that can’t be compromised in business. You. Can’t. Lie.

In this case, I was deceived. You were deceived. And here’s the message I would like to send to everyone in the business of chasing backlinks.  Please, look at what you’re doing.  If your primary business objective is to create SEO gold through deception, just think about what kind of a business environment you are creating. Is this something you are proud of?

The world of blogging and SEO seems to be in its own little world where the rules of business integrity often don’t apply. We seem to have an attiitude of “well, that’s just the way it’s done” without considering the moral, legal and ethical ramifications of our daily business practices.

Are we disconnected from ethics?

I’ve been employed in business for nearly 30 years. I’ve worked in Fortune 100 companies, start-ups and everything in between. I have faced gut-wrenching ethical situations with vast legal and financial consequences.  In other words, I’m not naive.

But when I see the daily trove of SEO bullshit that comes across my desk I just think WTF? What is this blogging business about?  What are we allowing — encouraging — as SEO professionals and marketers?

In this specific case, I am going to delete the Shakespeare post.  I thought about various options but that just seems to be the cleanest option.  I’ll leave it up until the end of July because it is relevant to this article. It’s kind of like looking at the wreck before it is moved to the side of the rode.

I’m not going to stop trusting people, but I guess I have to be more careful accepting content from people I don’t know well. I will also be able to link to this post as a cautionary tale to future guest bloggers.

Does this re-open the whole ghost blogging debate?  What’s your take on this situation?  Would you have handled it differently?

Addendum: Based on the feedback in the comment section, I decided to not delete the original post, but amend it to acknowledge William Harwood as the author.

Before I tell my tale, let me relate a few of my experiences this week …

• A very talented friend told me he was rejected for a job at a major ad agency because his Klout score was too low.
• A B2B marketing agency Managing Director told me he chose between two qualified candidates based on their Klout score.
• A friend in D.C is creating a Klout 50 Club exclusive to people with high Klout scores. Why? He wants to find good hires for social media marketing.
• A woman told me her boyfriend was accepted to a prestigious conference based on his Klout score alone.

These experiences occurred in the span of 72 hours.

This morning I had coffee with a family friend who just graduated from college and is seeking her first job as a writer/content creator.  She was eager to seek my advice on what she should do to get ahead and land a job.

My leg began to twitch.  My hands became cold and clammy.  My lips quivered.

And then the terrible words came out of  my mouth. “You need to take a hard look at your Klout score. It could make a difference if you’re seeking an entry level social media job.”

Oh my God. What did I just say??  What have I done?  I recommended that this young lady game a score to get a job? That she needed to focus on an internet RATING of her worthiness?

I felt sick and … dirty.  Filthy.  Slutty.

I still do. This isn’t what I want social media to be about.  This is not what I want people to aspire to. And yet, I can’t ignore what’s happening out there.  Facts are facts.  I would have been remiss to NOT mention it to her.

An algorithmic measure of influence can never tell the whole story, but it seems that it is starting to become a quick and easy indicator of … something.  Something that people are grabbing on to.  In a world where people are auto-responding their relationships and making business decisions based on 140-character sound bites, this thing seems to be going mainstream.

I’ll turn this over to you and your comments. I need to scrub down.

The only kind of cat fight I enjoy.

There is this great man I knew. We’ll call him John.  Because that was his name.

I’ve done a lot of crazy things in my career but probably none so challenging as serving as a facilitator for company-union labor negotiations.  It was an emotional and bruising experience.

The first time I met John, a union official, he told me within five minutes that he didn’t like me. He went on to explain that I was a “company man” and so he would always distrust and dislike me, no matter what.  This really pissed me off.

But truth be told, I didn’t like John either. He spoke in this thick, hick accent and I judged him to be an uneducated rube blindly following orders from shady union bosses who filed costly and ridiculous claims about work rules just to stonewall our progress and manipulate the negotiations.

Over a few days, John and I got to know each other better through the facilitated activities and over long lunches where we talked about our lives and families.

After the third day, he came up to me at a break and said, “I was wrong about you.  I just assumed all company people were born with a silver spoon in their mouth. You weren’t. You had to work for everything. I think the real reason I hated you is because I was jealous.  You worked hard and got somewhere.  I never did that.”

I’m sure the look of shock on my face was apparent.

But I also realized that over those days I had gained a new respect for him, too. I learned that John had been dragged through 39 different schools over his 12 grades of schooling.  He never really had a chance for a meaningful education or any close friendships during his entire childhood. He had bravely tried to salvage his alcoholic father, even when the man was waving a loaded gun at him as a child.  And John had become a great husband, father and grandfather who always had some new pictures of the kids to show me.  He was a lovely, caring man, forged by a lifetime of suffering.

I felt ashamed at how I had judged John.  Getting to know the real man was a life-changing discussion and I swore never to make rash judgments about people again.  I have never forgotten John’s “back story” and how my initial impressions were so unfair and wrong.

Through technology like the social web, it is easier than ever to make judgments about people. Usually we only see a little avatar and some written words. Maybe a phone call if we’re lucky. The technology is a convenient way to avoid personal contact.  And yet, I so often hear people putting others in categories they don’t deserve based on partial information.

From John, I learned that we really don’t know a person until we have walked in their shoes. We don’t know where they have been.  We don’t know how they have suffered.

You know, everybody starts out as this pure little baby with unlimited goodness and potential.  Then a lifetime of hurt and crap builds up around them and who knows what it does to somebody.

There are a lot of people I know who I wish had their own ”John” moment.  The cattiness and politics on the social web can be so disgusting.  It’s too easy to give “hit and run” feedback without thinking about the person behind the avatar.  Sometimes I feel like I’m watching “The Real Housewives of Facebook.”

I’m not going to accomplish much with this post.  Catty bitchy people will probably be catty bitchy people whether they read this or not and I realize this post is not going to provide a life-changing moment.  Maybe it’s more of a vent for me because sometimes people make the most audacious and hurtful assumptions and accusations when they don’t even know me.  It sickens me.

When our relationship is limited to 140-character sound bites, we really don’t know each other.  Let’s give each other a break, OK?  Love one another, even when it’s hard to understand.

I met a young blogger the other day who reported to me that one of his posts (attributed) had been used in the promotional client newsletter of one of the A-List bloggers, in fact probably the most famous blogger around. He was thrilled and hopeful that this fella’s vast audience might find their way to his own blog.

“Did he ask you if he could use your content?” I asked.

“No,” the young man replied.

“So a fellow blogger — and technically your direct competitor — stole your original content to use in marketing materials aimed at promoting his company and increasing his own sales?”

“Yes, I guess so,” he said with decidely less enthusiasm.

“Has he had any contact with you at all?”

“No.”

“Do you think he even knows who you are?”

“I don’t think so.”

This really happened and I see these scenarios played out almost daily.

I have been in the corporate world a long time and I have to tell you, in any business other than blogging, what happened in this situation would probably result in a court case. I didn’t name names because the practice illustrated here is commonplace among social media bloggers.

Now I know there are certain potential benefits of exposure through the article link that can help this young blogger. But the senior blogger in question should know better and be more professional than simply using another writer’s original work without even the courtesy of asking for permission to re-print.

What is it about the social web that makes people think they have the right to use the work of others without even a common “please” or “thank you?” — let alone (gasp) COMPENSATING us for our work? This is simply arrogance and greed that is out of control.  They are giving their fellow professionals less credit than they would give to a $2 stock photo.

The sad part is, I think the entire social web is becoming numb to the fact that this whole system is corrupt.

It reminds me of the time I visited a developing country … a nation run by thugs.  The citizens had been immersed in corruption for so long, they had forgotten what free enterprise was supposed to be like.  The children looked up to and emulated the crooks because they didn’t know any other way.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the broken economics of blogging.  Business “professionals” stealing content for their personal gain is another symptom of a lack of leadership in this space. It’s like some of these bloggers are school yard bullies picking though everybody’s lunch instead of acting like leaders who should be inspiring, mentoring and creating an inclusive business model.

I don’t have any problem with a news feed aggregating content and I’ve never refused somebody’s request to use my content for their own private newsletter.  But it seems like reasonable business professionals would have the courtesy and good sense to at least ASK to use a writer’s work before publishing it as valued-added content for their customers. The social web has been overrun with an entitlement mentality that views any copywritten, original content as something that can be freely re-purposed for private commercial gain.

What’s your take on this? Aren’t you getting fed up with these bullying business practices … or are you comfortably numb?

Then unexpectedly, your hear your composition in a television commercial. You didn’t even know about this — let alone have compensation for it!  Then you hear your song covered by another artist — just ripped off! They won’t even acknowledge that it’s your song and THEY’RE making money from it.  Suddenly, your song is everywhere. There is no way to stop it. Your work is lost, hopelessly spread over the world forever.  It makes you feel like you never want to write a song again.

This is what life is like as a creative individual on the Internet.

Content is ripped off wholesale. There is an expectation that any type of creative output is free and should be freely distributed.

As the popularity of my blog has grown, so has the popularity of ripping it off. In the past month, my blog posts have been:

• Reproduced in their entirety on other blogs without attribution of any kind.
• Used as promotional content on other people’s revenue-producing websites, blogs and eNewsletters
• Taken in their entirety to populate SEO scam sites.

This is not unusual. It happens all the time to any blogger of note. It’s sickening and depressing.  It’s the dark side of “viral.”

The economics of the Internet are broken

This “content harvesting” I’m describe occurs with art, music, movies, games, software … any creative output on the social web. So I’m not alone with this problem but that doesn’t make it right.

There is no way to stop it. I’ve tried addressing individual occurrences and it’s like playing a global game of social media Wack-a-Mole. And I’m sure for every one rip-off I learn about there are 10 that I don’t.

For more than 15 years — really since the dawn of Napster – people have been creating an Internet culture of entitlement. If it’s on the web, it is fair game for free use and distribution, no matter the implications for the creator.

There have been promises of new revenue models falling into place to support these artists but it hasn’t happened, and I don’t think it will.  Any form of protection like Creative Commons is essentially toothless.

Taking a stand

I can’t address this widespread problem, but I can take a stand in my own little piece of the web. So I am making two changes on {grow} in response to this issue.

First, I am featuring a modest amount of advertising on the side column of this blog. This will never seep into the editorial portion of the blog. You will never see affiliate links or sponsored posts. These are organizations I believe in, and in some cases, the ads (like for Amachi or Habitat for Humanity) are posted at no charge. It is a small way to support good work.

I am a consultant and teacher. The only thing I have to sell is my time. While there are indirect benefits of blogging, having some modest direct income will help justify spending more time on content and comments.  It will make it a better blog!

Ending guest post slavery

I will use advertising revenue to pay four contributing writers.  If you haven’t noticed them yet, they are:

• Sidney Eve Matrix – Culture and technology professor at Queens University and a blogging inspiration
• Stanford Smith — Blogging intellect and the sweetest writer on the web
• Neicole Crepeau — Ex-Microsoft-er who sees the social web in an entirely different and humanistic way.
• Srinivas Rao– He’s interviewed 130 bloggers. “Nuff said.

They are among the best writers and diverse thinkers on the social web. Period.

And while exposure on {grow} will undoubtedly help their own blogs and businesses, it is time to break this cycle of slave labor expectations of guest bloggers.  It is unfair and wrong to build and monetize a community or business on the free labor of others.

I’ve thought about these issues a lot and I think it is time to take a stand against this destructive “free” mentality in a positive way.  I also hope I am accomplishing this in a manner that builds on the integrity of the blog, my deep respect for this community, and an urgent desire to provide the most insanely great content on the social web.

It’s an experiment.  Let’s see if it works.

As always, I would cherish your thoughts on these issues in the comment section.

Judging by her school-issue personal photo, Twana Florance appears to be a mild-mannered, middle-aged matron from Twin Falls, Idaho.  But there is no Twana Florance. Twana is probably some teenager in a Third World country hired to propagate and populate fake Twitter accounts that will later be sold on eBay.

Twitter has done a good job clearing out most of the porn stars and MLM hacks who almost brought the service to its knees by mid-2009. But the new breed of spammer is hiding behind a tender smile like Twana.

For the time being, it’s the stupid tweets that give it away but the spammers will probably get around that soon too. What does it hurt?  What does it matter if spammers trick you into following them?  Believe it or not, blocking spammers like “Twana” might actually lead to important business benefits in the future.  Here’s why.

Social influence and spam

A few months ago my friend Steve Dodd made an interesting observation. Chris Brogan, one of the top five social media bloggers in the world who currently carries enough Twitter followers to form a small nation, tweeted out about a specific issue … and I did too. Steve — who has a great analytical mind — noticed that my message, sent out at the same time, was re-tweeted about the same number of times as Chris. However, the number of RT’s compared to my number of followers was a vastly larger ratio compared to Chris.

“If a higher percentage of people re-tweet your message, wouldn’t this indicate that you are more influential than Chris?” Steve asked.

At first I dismissed this as a mildly-interesting aberration but the more I thought about it, the more I think Steve might be on to something.

One of the reasons Chris has so many followers is that he typically doesn’t block any one. Chris stated at a speech I attended last year that “half the people who follow me are spammers and porn stars.”

In the old days (six months ago) of social influence, having a large number of followers — no matter who they are — was a status symbol. But in this age of algorithms and Klout scores, simply having large numbers of non-human followers could work against you because that “conversation ratio” is going to be a measure of influence.

Here is what the new social scoring systems are reflecting: Spammers don’t engage. Spammer don’t re-tweet. Having spammers among your list of followers will drive your social influence score DOWN.

Ethics of blocking spam

From the beginning, I have done my best to look at the profile of every person who follows me to determine whether I should follow back, just let them follow me, or if I should nuke them.  I probably block about 25 percent of the people who try to follow me because I attract a lot of crap I guess! Yes, this takes a little extra work, but the 18,000 people who follow me are legitimate, real people to the best of my knowledge.

When I adopted this strategy, I didn’t have social scoring systems like Klout in mind. Ejecting spammers was just the right thing to do (and still is) for four reasons:

1. My Twitter Tribe matters. If I follow you, I choose to do so. No auto-follows, ever. Before I follow, I have read your bio, some of your tweets and probably clicked your link. I have a quality audience and it’s staying that way.
2. I want an audience to be proud of. This probably sounds old-fashioned but I don’t want to do anything in my life that I wouldn’t be proud to disclose to my children. And if they examined my Twitter audience, I would not want them to see a bunch of nymphs peddling their videos. Anybody can see who you’re following. What does your audience say about you?
3. I want to protect you. If I block the spamaholics I keep them from my tweets and I keep them, in a small way, from you. I see so many of these folks who copy “Follow Friday” lists trying to lure followers. No. Stay away from my friends dammit.
4. Because I just do not want to play that game. I’m not going to be passive and imply that what they’re doing is OK.

The business case for blocking

Blocking sends a message and that’s important. But I increasingly believe that having a quality list of followers who actually exist and care about you is going to make a difference because measures of social scoring are going to be a big deal. I recently wrote about the importance of Klout scores and other systems that will emerge. If you missed it, please read it because it’s an important trend that is even having an impact on SEO strategies.

And by the way, Chris (with 167,350 followers) has a Klout score of 84.

Me?  I currently have just 10 percent of the followers Chris has but have a Klout score of 76. My hypothesis is that the quality of my followers is one contributor since I do not pretend for a minute to have the reach or power of Chris Brogan.

I don’t want to turn this into a debate about Klout or its social scoring competitors. Whether you or I philosophically agree with what they do is irrelevant because these systems exist, are growing in importance, and we need to deal with this fact dispassionately.

My point is that there might be a legitimate business case to support a strategy of blocking spammers, as well as an ethical one. What’s your take on it? Does this make sense to you?