Lawyers, Don't Hire Spammers to Promote Your Law Firms

I understand that some lawyers, probably many or most, simply don't know any better - somebody calls them up promising to generate more traffic to their website. The well-practiced sales pitch makes it sound like a good deal, and then... stuff like this starts getting posted around the Internet under the name of the lawyer or the law firm:

John_P****s_law

It sounds as if you could possibly have a case but it may be a close one. I think it would be worth your time to go and talk to a professional lawyer in Washington State. Be sure to bring all important documents including your medical papers and perhaps an over view from your current doctor that did find the tumor explaining the situation. Hope this helped and good luck.
_________________
Do you think you have a case? The Law Offices of John P****s may be able to help you!

That wasn't the worst example I've seen - just the latest to hit one of my forums. The trick that particular spammer used was to try to paraphrase prior comments (which may be from non-lawyers) in order to try to create something that sounds reasonable.

Usually, the company you hired is either based in or subcontracts with another company in the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, or elsewhere in the developing world and pays somebody in that nation with middling English skills to push your link out to forums and blogs. (That particular spammer was working out of the United States, so the lawyer probably paid a premium for the website promotion services.) I'm sure they will subsequently hand you a nice list, perhaps with pretty charts, showing how many links they generated for your site. What they won't tell you is that most of those links will have little to no value for your website and, in some cases, the rapid volume of new, similar links on sites that allow user-generated conduct will trigger a penalty for your site.

But it's worse than that. You're a lawyer. You have ethical duties that govern your advertising - and make no mistake about it, this is advertising. No, you weren't told that a worker in an overseas phone bank would be posting messages that appear to be from you or from your law firm, but that doesn't mean you're not responsible for their actions. You didn't exercise due diligence when hiring your website promotion firm, you didn't adequately supervise their work, and they could be out there posting wildly incorrect information or giving wildly incorrect advice under your name.

Recall also, you probably have a duty to maintain a copy of all of those posts in your records for a specific period of time in order to comply with the advertising rules for your state.

The Narcissistic Side of Twitter

In thinking about Twitter, and the reason it lives on despite its core functionality being replicated by services like Facebook and Google Plus, two things occurred to me. First, Twitter achieved its initial rise due to an influx of celebrities. Second, Twitter allows ordinary people to follow, or even be followed by, celebrities, to engage in what seems like a conversation, and perhaps even to experience the excitement of having a celebrity respond to or re-tweet something that they have said. Second, it is the faux relationships that continue to drive Twitter. The sense that somebody you have seen on television "knows" you, cares about what you say, or is even reading and writing her own tweets. Yes, some celebrities manage their own feeds. Others have publicists or staff members who handle that for them, yet even when they're known to use proxies other Twitter members still seem to feel the thrill of contact.

Twitter serves celebrities, in that much of celebrity is built upon a false sense of communality or camaraderie, and now you can have "proof" that a celebrity likes you and cares what you have to say. It's an automation of the historically slow process of receiving fan mail, perhaps responding to it, perhaps dropping in a head shot. It's like being a member of a celebrity fan club, but where the celebrity actually "knows you you are" and "shows up". Twitter may be the virtual equivalent of the butler at the door or, for those who tweet through proxies, the virtual equivalent of the intercom between the butler at the door and you outside the locked exterior gate. But if you can't see all of that distancing, is it really there?

What brought this to mind today? A smart person who probably should know better than to care about Paris Hilton in the first place:

Paris Hilton is tweeting up a storm about how much she loves Bali. It's her first visit. She tweeted a few hours ago, "Make a wish. 11.1l.11"

Since I've stood up for Paris on TalkLeft so many times during her various legal difficulties, I thought I'd ask her a favor. I tweeted her in reply:

@ParisHilton I wish you'd visit Aussie Schapelle Corby, doing 20 years for pot in Kerobokan Prison in bli, Pls Google her name.

"I've blogged favorably about her," meets, "She's on Twitter", and somehow that seems to become, "She may listen to me and perhaps even share my outrage at Bali's legal system". Even if we assume Paris manages her own feed, and doesn't pass that task off to a publicist or intern, what about Paris would make you think that her trip to Bali and her raving about the wonders of the country is being driven by her amazement? Would it not be a safer bet that she has been comped or compensated to promote the nation or certain of its attractions, and won't be saying anything negative? (Call me cynical, but I believe Paris's raving is a thinly disguised sales pitch from a somewhat over-the-hill celebrity spokesmodel. Bali isn't under FTC jurisdiction.)

If a celebrity "friends" you on Facebook or, if we're to that point, adds you to a Google Plus circle, you can see (or search for) your face among the tens of thousands of others. Yes, if you want to browse the members somebody claims to follow or his list of followers, your account will be every bit as difficult to find. But Twitter puts the feed, not the faces, front and center. And due to occasional celebrity retweets or responses, people do get reinforced that their tweets are being heard.

I heard a celebrity being interviewed recently (it may have been Louis C.K.) and he mentioned both that he didn't like Twitter and that people got angry at him because he didn't follow anybody. (Solution: Hire an intern?) To me, this highlights the extent to which Twitter flourishes upon the false sense of "He likes me too". Even if you never look at the feed, you'll have a happier population of followers, and probably a much larger one, if you make them think you care what they say. Twitter makes that easy.

I don't mean to diminish Twitter's value as a communication tool. There are people who like it for following news, politics, business tips, etc. I just happen to be coming to the conclusion that the thing that allows Twitter to continue is the false sense of community it creates between its high profile members and their followers and that, absent that, it would be a shadow of its present self. A mere year ago, Justin Bieber was responsible for a full 3% of Twitter's traffic. What does that tell you?

So What Else is New

Apple's announcement of iAd pretty much demonstrates why I shouldn't try to guess what Apple is up to. I may get close, but I'll probably be wrong.

iAd, which enables interactive ads inside an app, is an affront to Google whose business relies on browser-based searching. "People aren't searching on a mobile device like they are on a desktop device," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. "They are using apps to get to the Internet."

And now app producers can monetize their "free" apps with iAd and, thanks to Apple's patented approach to serving ads, advertisers can know that their ads are actually being watched. This also makes more understandable why Apple has been so cautious about approving Apps, even to the frustration of many developers. Advertisers can be comfortable that their ads won't be used to monetize, for example, X-rated content.

Putting the Chain Before the Ball?

That's probably not the most sensitive title to a post on marriage.... (I was thinking of "Putting the cart before the horse".) Um... anyway. David Brooks lectures,

Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being. If you have a successful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many professional setbacks you endure, you will be reasonably happy. If you have an unsuccessful marriage, it doesn’t matter how many career triumphs you record, you will remain significantly unfulfilled.

But Brooks' claim raises the question, is it truly the marriage that makes you happy and fulfilled, or is it that people who are happy and fulfilled tend to either enter into happier marriages, find their marriages to be happier and more fulfilling (whatever somebody else might think), or both? If people who are intrinsically happy enter into happier marriages, it would be no real surprise that they're also happier at work - it's their personality driving their happiness in both contexts. If your personality is such that you always want more, then you're apt to find your marriage and work unsatisfying.

I suspect that Brooks was inspired by this recent New Yorker article, which notes that things we expect to make us happy often don't.

Several theories have been offered to explain why the United States is, in effect, a nation of joyless lottery winners. One, the so-called “hedonic treadmill” hypothesis, holds that people rapidly adjust to improved situations; thus, as soon as they acquire some new delight—a second house, a third car, a fourth-generation iPhone—their expectations ramp upward, and they are left no happier than before. Another is that people are relativists; they are interested not so much in having more stuff as in having more than those around them. Hence, if Jack and Joe both blow their year-end bonuses on Maseratis, nothing has really changed and neither is any more satisfied.

Peripherally related to the subject of marriage,

Research that Graham has done in Afghanistan shows that, despite three decades of war and widespread destitution, Afghans are, on average, a pretty cheerful lot. (The most cheerful areas of the country tend to be those in which the Taliban’s influence is stronger.)

You might not get that impression from books like A Thousand Spendid Suns, but then I suspect that opinion polling in Taliban areas is heavily skewed toward reports from men who may be very happy with their marital relationships. I suspect that another factor ties into relativism - when your neighbors don't have much, it's easier to be content with what you have. When I was traveling in Southeast Asia, it was a pretty obvious takeaway that you can live a full, contented life with a minimum of "stuff", and that it's in fact easier to be happy once you clear away the clutter and focus on your needs instead of your wants. That's a message Madison Avenue would prefer you not hear.

I don't find the "hedonic treadmill" model to be incompatible with the "relativist" model of happiness. That is, while I think people can be more content when there's no competition to "keep up with the Joneses", whether by virtue of the financial realities of their society or by virtue of the recognition that they can choose to be happy with what they have, following triumph or tragedy most people will adjust back to their baseline level of contentment (or discontent). You can make society happier by disappointing Madison Avenue, educating people that having "more stuff" is not the key to happiness, but you can also focus on early childhood development. That, after all, is when a child's basic outlook on life - love, safety, security, whether or not basic needs will be fulfilled - is established.

Apple's Advertising Patent, Revisited

Not so long ago, I speculated about the goal of Apple's advertising patent that allows advertisers to test whether users have watched an ad, locking them out from... something... at the hardware level if they had not. My guess was that Apple was going to use the feature to offer "free music", earned by those willing to watch ads.

But then along came the iPad. The larger format, and what appears to be a strong effort by Apple to bring traditional media to its new platform, suggests that users might be able to access firewalled news content after verifiably watching an ad. Websites such as Salon have experimented with advertising-based "day passes", and increasing numbers of sites are introducing ads and interstitials on all content. The Apple patent seems like a good tool for bringing some revenue to traditional media outlets while allowing users to get "free" access to their content, but limiting their ability to "cheat the system".

Um... Do I Smell Bad?

By now, you've all seen this cleverly produced Old Spice commercial:

After seeing the commercial my daughter turned to me and asked, "Daddy, can you get that?"

As The Economy Worsens....

I suspect that online advertising may continue to flourish. Why? Because you can measure the return on your ad campaigns, and with proper monitoring can quickly terminate ads and campaigns that aren't performing. I expect "pay per click" and "pay for performance" ads to continue to perform both for businesses and for publishers who use them properly.