Shocking Online Marketing Strategies, Punk Rock Style

They’re like characters from a cyberpunk novel — schemers who’re out to beat “the man” — any man. Even the “little guy.” They’re Internet entrepreneurs who make stealth moves in the online marketing underground.

They’re a frenetic bunch, like punk rockers thrashing around the dark corners of the Internet. Attitudinal and awash in anarchy. What they want is to get rich quick.

They’ll do or say almost anything to make money online. A relatively small group of Internet marketers, they aren’t actually hackers. They just do all sorts of slick, creative things to separate you from your money.

Who’s In the Online Marketing Mosh Pit

• Those who want to break you: you’re their competition. For example, if your pay-per-click Web business is doing too well with the same keywords they’re using, they’ll hire an off-shore service to run a click fraud campaign on your site. The purpose is to get your site banned by Google, which thinks you’re the only person clicking the pay-per-click ads on your site. It’s one of the dirtiest tricks in the online marketing playbook.

• There’s another type of underground Internet marketer, a kind of Walter Mitty. These folk get excited about conceptualizing fantastic personas, to make their their digital product offers more compelling. Just one example: A man contracted us to ghostwrite his Internet marketing ebook. Later, we discovered that he’d had someone write his sales letter for the ebook, claiming to be a teenage girl who’d made, like, a half-million dollars in using the online marketing techniques we put in his ebook.

• And there’s this other underground sabotage trick in affiliate marketing. There are affiliate marketing gurus who teach people how to undermine their competitors by running a smear campaign. They tell you to create a second/separate website, and write a negative review of your competitor’s product. You can always identify these ploys when you see a pay-per-click ad or search result saying something like, “IS PRODUCT X A SCAM? READ THIS REVIEW!!“

But why act so surprised by all of this? Most of us have seen The Social Network, the movie based on the creation of Facebook. Well, Facebook’s still going strong — and so are its slam-dancing online marketing strategies.

Top Dog In the Online Marketing Fight Club

Facebook recently made a huge announcement, getting social networking fans and followers all hyped-up about a new feature it calls Timeline. Timeline is basically a redesign of your profile page on Facebook. It allows you to make your profile page look more interesting by adding videos, photos, etc. scrap-booking your life in a snazzy new layout.

Problem is, the name “Timeline” was trademarked by another company years ago. A site called Timelines.com says the name that Facebook gave its new feature is a trademark infringement. Their open statement expresses a belief that Facebook’s going to destroy their business.

Equally punkish, Facebook took over the smaller company’s Facebook page. Facebook has corrected itself on this bully move now. But for a while, when people went to Timelines.com’s Facebook page, Facebook would boldly redirect them to a different page. You’d land on a page touting the new profile page… Do they teach this trick in some Online Marketing Master Class?

The Dangers of Dirty Dancing

Timelines.com (with an “s”) has filed a lawsuit in a federal court against Facebook. This seems to have slowed Facebook’s roll-out. Their new Timeline feature was scheduled to launch around October 4th. Now, over a month later, it’s still not available to everyone. At present, Web developer-types are really the only people invited to access the new profile page layout.

Many people weren’t familiar with Timelines.com until they learned of their Facebook lawsuit. So in a way, the legal rumble is turning out to be great publicity for Timelines.com.

Timelines is a site with a noble mission, allowing people to explore, curate and share events in world history. It’s a wonderful educational tool for people of all ages. There are multimedia timeline pages covering topics across the ages, ranging from Mark Twain and the rock band Yes to some of the most popular Viral Videos of all time.

Anti-social Networking?

Timelines.com isn’t asking Facebook to drop their new profile page layout. They’re asking Facebook discontinue calling its new feature “Timeline.”

Considering that Facebook owns rights to (or has applied for rights to) common words like face and wall and like, you’d think they’d avoid using a name like timeline/timelines, when another company owns it. But apparently that’s old school, and these aren’t your average Internet marketers. These are punk rocker business types who love being in the online marketing mosh pit.

What are your thoughts? Have you encountered any clever online marketing schemes? And what do you make of the Facebook versus Timelines dispute?