Listen, there’s nothing new under the sun.  Just because someone has tons of endorsements, that doesn’t mean squat.

There’s a self organizing delusional cult out there, and you can too, for just $129.99.  Got it? You can launch your tiny coaching business from nothing and conquer the world.

It’s a crock. It’s a trap that will keep you in a game that never makes you money.  You’ll self destruct.

Read this whole thing and you won’t. I promise. You’ll see the truth and do better.

First, let’s explain where online authority comes from.

Page Rank Doesn’t Account for Bots and Spinners

Let’s take the example of Page Rank by Google. The first premise of PageRank is this: that every single page on the web has a tiny amount of Page Rank. This represents a “credit” for the effort it took to make the web page. Page Rank is authority transferred and aggregated.  If many links go to one site, that site accumulates Page Rank.

Content producers need to gin up links, but there is a problem. PageRank presumes that human effort created the content.

PageRank won’t know how to deal with aggregators and bots and content spinners. If a bot can do 10,000 pages an hour, all different, is there value there? The teensy amounds of page rank add up and pass authority to sites where it doesn’t belong. Even with Panda stuff happens.

What if the page itself was create only to transfer the minuscule amount of presumed authority upstream? Does it then have the intrinsic authority that PageRank implies? This is how you used to game the search engines. A bunch of crap pages in a box somewhere. Farm-ZineArticles and its ilk. Google’s been combating this since its first days, most recently with the “Panda” update.

Larry Page’s PageRank  premise of PageRank was that human effort was behind a page, and someone wanted it up. What if no human did it?  If even 1% of the spun content gets into the index of Google, we’re all screwed because 1% of a trillion pages is too many.

When the basis of Authority works with a faulty assumption, it follows that there are problems everywhere.

The Echo Chamber is Self Organizing

Social proof is hacked. Proof is now meaningless in many ways.

We rely, to some degree, on social social proof to buy things.  Yelp gets a ton of traffic selling our reviews back to us. We look at who our Facebook friends are friends with before making a choice.  We purchase because of social proof. It’s shorthand.

When you hack this and pervert social proof, you can win. Let’s consider the case of a pretend author that wrote a book.

Let’s take Tom Hopkins, business author, a our hypothetical example.  We often see quotes from him on the front – and back – cover of various sales books.

“Oh, Tom Hopkins said on the front cover that this book doesn’t suck?  Well, shoot, I’ll have a gander.”   Once a book is in your hand, you may be persuaded to buy it. We don’t understand that Tom may well charge a fee for some consulting service that includes a review.  This may be $5,000 and it may be more. It’s implied that the review will be favorable in the consulting deal.

Tom’s endorsement is worth 5 stacks.  Tom lends his credibility to the new author.  People buy.

The new Author–we’ll call him Steve– buys a “consulting” package that includes a nice implied pull quote from Tom Hopkins.

In exchange, the new Author–let’s call him Steve–is now dependent on Tom can’t ever say that Tommy hasn’t had a good idea since the 1970s. (Which is true).

The new author  won’t t say that because he’s trapped by the endorsement. Bought off. It works just as well for Tom, because he’s now insulated from criticism. Can’t take shots at someone that you got an endorsement from. Roger Ebert has a fascinating take on this idea.

When Steve hired Tom to “consult” on the book package, he didn’t understand that he was forever compromising his ability to deliver criticism to Tom.  ”Come over here dear boy, welcome to the machine.” (To mix up some Pink Floyd lyrics.)

It doesn’t require malice or fraud.  On Tom’s side, he’s well intentioned. He has connections, and people probably ask about making that  book deal. So Tom offers some consulting as a way to help. He probably means well.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

-Upton Sinclair

Some fabulously hilarious writers I know think that there’s overt corruption. There might be, but I think it’s mostly just daddy issues.

The Bloggers Make This Happen at LightSpeed

I’ve been sick of blogs lately. I unsubscribed to a ton of ‘em because they have all echoed the same shit for 2 years. Bereft of real insight or value, once great blogs have become content farms of sorts where riffs on the 4 basic themes are played:

• Lifestyle marketing and the new rich is the way to go.
• Corporations are dead and meetings totally suck
• Content marketing is what smart people do.
• Ron Paul! Ron Paul! Ron Paul!

The bloggers offer this incestuous compromise at light speed.

What if a blogger exists only to promote someone else’s stuff? This could be called an affiliate marketer. Does that endorsement matter? If I endorse the company I work for, does it matter? A little, maybe, but it’s still perverted.

What happens when social proof itself is purchased? Newt has some ideas about this.

What happens when an idiot endorses a famous blogger with a great and compelling testimonial?  Do you think the blogger will turn down the chance to put a photo there and caption it? No chance. What if they are batshit nuts, delusional and emotionally unhinged?  Hey, the endorsement sounds great, let’s go with it. Batshit people need beacons too.

Why I Know This

Let me tell you a story.

When I was selling websites (badly), I collected testimonial videos. I might have 40 of ‘em lying around. They helped me sell websites.   sold pretty well, I delivered badly. This isn’t self loathing, it’s a fact.

I never once asked a customer to lie. But they did. I know this. They said they were getting benefits that they never got. I had their hosting, saw the traffic first hand. My customers were trying to help me. They lied, all the time. They said that I was better than I was. I never asked for this.

I never asked for this. Not once. I never used the known lies in my marketing.  I had to restrain people and ask them to be truthful. All I wanted was to get them to say that the process was good, but unprompted they made ridiculous claims about their fake success.  I didn’t understand why, but they were simply hoping it was coming true.

I just showed them how to record on Youtube in 3 easy steps. My customers were kind, nice people.  Mostly Realtors, mortgage folks and their ilk.  None of them ever meant to do anything but benefit me.  The exaggerated because they were delusional.  It was a mystifying  - and unintended – social experiment

Some famous blogger will take an endorsement, put it on a product page, and the new blogger will get to have the benefit of being part of the club. So, it’s in the new blogger’s interest to gin up as many product endorsements as possible, and play as nice as possible.  Then they can too, you see?

Everyone is compromised, nobody has malice or fraudulent intentions. Everyone probably even means well, despite why my fabulously hilarious acquaintance says. Nobody feels compromised: of course we could tell off the big blogger.

This also compromises new ideas.  Our economy is in need of the destruction of old ideas. There are bad ideas being portrayed as truth abut everything.  I don’t often agree with everything a lot of bloggers say, but

Again: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. 

Our inherent biological valuation of social proof probably presumes it won’t be hacked.  Like PageRank, it is probably assumed that we aren’t gaming the system, and our presence there is an endorsement of sorts.  We all know somethings amiss, we have that queazy feeling, but we can’t place it.

Kiss the ring, promote our stuff, and someday you might get to guest post regularly.  When you do, you’re forever unable to say anything bad.  Be a good company man. Don’t bite the hand that has made you. No money needs to change hands, the rules are understood tacitly.

I’m Compromised, Too

Take this at face value: I’m compromised. When a client buys from me – be it a website or anything else, I’m going to be publicly cordial forever. They are a customer, I’m not going to rip a customer, it’s simply poor form. You’d be scared of me if I went all Mike Arrington on my own, and I don’t have that kind of style.

Only classless people gossip about others.  Even if circumstances change,  I am bought off and I’ll shut up.  So take this stuff as it is.  The blogosphere – from the Blogworld folks and around them – have all sold out, tacitly. There’s no room for dissent because there’s money to be had.

There’s also upward mobility- you can grind your way up the food chain pretty quickly, I’ve watched others do it.

I don’t have any immature  urge to tell my former clients a thing or two online. That does no good.  There are a couple we have no plans (or, fortunately, need) to do business with.  But I’m not “naming names.” Just be aware that things aren’t what they seem. My clients lied freely and without prompting.