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Business Ethics on the Web

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1. TRUTH

Obviously no-one likes being lied to. And yet many (thankfully not all) internet marketers appear to have little trouble in doing so to others. Claims of sensational results are conjured out of nowhere, or so it seems. Possibly most frequent is simple exaggeration, maybe the insistence that little or no work is required to become very rich. How many "proven systems" were launched only last week after piloting with at most a handful of people for a fortnight? How many "guaranteed" schemes have been successful with more than 5% of their users?

Another way in which potential customers are misled is to assure them that a service is "Free!" Once into the subscription process, however, it quickly becomes apparent that the free version provides about 10% of the promoted benefits whereas to get anything meaningful demands a (usually monthly) payment.

But even the "monthly" payment can be deceptive. "Only $9.95 per month," screams the advert, but when you get to the payment screen it's suddenly $29.85 per quarter. That happened to me recently. I was annoyed, but decided to go ahead with it. In two other cases in the past week, though, I've refused to buy their services and have registered in my mind some major reservations as to the integrity of the business owners concerned. In each case I had reached the PayPal screen before I realised that they had without warning converted a much-trumpeted and very reasonable monthly price quotation into an annual advance payment.

Copy writing skills are vital in the armoury of the successful advertiser. Many of the training programmes, for example, on email marketing and the design of splash and landing pages pay great attention to the use of certain words and phrases designed to draw in the hungry buyers with cash in hand. But is immediate revenue-generating effectiveness the only criterion? Is truth no factor in this equation?

Many people may feel that in clever advertising there's no necessity to be scrupulously honest and transparent, but don't be deceived: short-term gain can quickly be eroded by loss of reputation. Wouldn't it be refreshing if products and services were advertised with strings of caveats along the lines of. "This product is the economy version. and isn't likely to do you any good at all unless you work hard at it, but if you're looking for a good starter-pack this might be for you." Would such honesty pay off in the longer term?

Recently I've been looking at a number of traffic exchanges in some detail. I'm not going to name them because I'm not yet totally confident of all the facts, there may be technical reasons for the discrepancies of which I am not yet aware, and in any case I'm not generally into naming and shaming. However, I have serious suspicions that in at least one case not all click credits were being registered, and when I raised the question gently with the business concerned the reply was far from convincing. In several cases also it has proved impossible to reconcile the alleged number of visits generated to the target site with the figures provided either by my hosting and rotator services or by any of the several different script-based statistics utilities tested. I hope I'm proved wrong.

Business owners who can develop a justifiable reputation for accuracy in their counting, modesty in their claims, reality in their predictions, and transparency in their pricing, will in the long-term build a loyal clientele - and it has has been proven many times over that the most profitable customers are those who stay around for repeat business. Truth pays!

A series of ten short articles, expanding on the notes in this series on the web site and relating these principles to business on the web, is now in preparation. The series will consist of an introductory overview and one on each of the eight principles, plus a closing summary. The articles will be placed on this site in the near future, probably after the major relaunch due in late-2008.

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