Litigation

Would you work with a company that is deliberately misleading blog readers?

By Tracy Coenen

Recently I’ve posted a couple of articles about my disappointment with LinkedIn. It’s my opinion that for most professionals it’s a complete waste of time. Actual benefits from it are few and far between, unless you’re looking for a job or you’re a headhunter.

This morning there was a pending comment here on one of those articles. It was from someone pretending to be a happy user of a similar site, Salesconx. This site lets users buy and sell leads, and supposedly you don’t pay unless the lead meets your criteria.

Here’s how they describe the service:

But why limit yourself to just your own network when you can leverage the relationships of other experienced sales professionals? We recognize that professionals spend a lot of time and effort cultivating their business relationships, which is why we created Salesconx.

Thousands of other professionals just like you are buying referrals and earning referral fees by doing something that many do ever yday - networking with likeminded professionals. With the Salesconx network of professionals spanning North America and representing dozens of industries, our members are able to easily and painlessly pinpoint that right person, without all of the fruitless costs.

And they’ve struck a deal with LinkedIn to “monetize” their network and have LinkedIn users buy and sell leads too. It sounds like a decent concept, and I think it might even work for professionals in the right fields.

But here’s my problem with Salesconx: The person commenting here and pretending to be the happy user of SalesConX and recommending it to my other readers, was actually an employee of Salesconx.

Now some may pooh-pooh this and say, “Oh well. They’re just trying to market their service.”

I disagree. Marketing means being honest. That would look like this: “I work for Salesconx and I think our service might be a good option for some of your readers. Our benefits include…”

Instead, they’re flat-out lying by pretending to be a happy user of the site.

So if I don’t like their deceptive approach, why am I giving them air time and linking to them? To tell readers who they are so they can avoid dishonest companies. The comment here was not just a shameless plug. It was a dishonest attempt to get readers to believe the commenter was an unbiased user who just liked the site. That doesn’t fly here.

Full post as published by The FRAUDfiles Blog on May 21, 2008 (boomark / email).