12 Signs You May Be a Marketing Douchebag

Since I started highlighting the many kinds of Marketing Douchebags running loose on the Internet, I’ve had suggestions from readers who feel that they, too, have discovered some web-based chicanery that deserves to be celebrated for its guile.  But I have yet to meet anyone who’s had the presence of mind to actually turn himself in for being an asshole.

Maybe that’s because most douchebags have a hard time admitting what they’ve become.  After all, no one wakes up one day and says, “I want to build a business founded on the stench of desperation and shame.”  And yet, day by day, each of us who makes a living online inches closer and closer to that wavy line separating the ethical from the amoral, the white hats from the black hats, the justifiable to the indefensibly flawed.

But how does one define that particular je ne sais quoi?  That’s hard, partly because it’s a matter of degree and partly because it’s a subjective distinction.  Like pornography, it’s a special kind of wrong that most people don’t know until they see it.  Nonetheless, if you’re at all concerned about your own self-image — and if you’re online, you obviously are — here are 12 Signs You May Be a Marketing Douchebag:

1. All links, no content.
2. You make unverifiably boastful claims.
3. The driving principle behind your revenue stream is customer fear.
4. Your reputation is built around stolen content.
5. Hot chick avatar + catch-all handle – relevant content = spam farm.
6. Google has trouble verifying your existence.
7. You repeatedly invoke the name “Trump.”
8. Your wealth scheme involves charging strangers for access to an opportunity.
9. You promise others guaranteed traffic.
10. (Come to think of it, you promise people guaranteed anything…)
11. You use the term Multi-Level Marketing (or MLM) with no hint of irony.
12. Your claims of expertise cannot be supported by your statistics.

Seasons Change, But Douchebags Are Forever

Social media is so easy to use, anyone can do it.  As a result, the spammers, robots, shameless opportunists and ethical cesspools will continue to multiply until they’ve devoured all meaningful content and rendered the Internet a putrid wasteland of gibberish profiles and pyramid schemes.  Your best defense against this impending tragedy is a one-two punch of independent thought and pop-up blockers, but even those won’t save your sanity forever.

Sooner or later, we all fall prey to the douchebags.  Sooner or later, we all wake up in a cold sweat, fingers gnarled around a printout of freshly-generated leads, desperate to make back that $19,00 buy-in cost that seemed so reasonable at 4 o’clock in the morning.

But if you can see them coming… if you can hear the roar of the douchebags, and smell their oily paws before they nudge your cursor toward that homemade video featuring a self-proclaimed millionaire offering you business tips from his kitchen… maybe… just maybe… you’ll be the lucky one.

Maybe you’ll be able to hold out for the Platinum package.

Tags: bullshit, Business, common sense, marketing douchebags, perception, Social Media