On Sunday nights, Mack Collier runs a Twitter-based group chat called #blogchat, which I highly recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about blogging while hobnobbing with their peers.

But, based on the defensive reaction to some of my comments from several of the #blogchat participants, I’ve realized that #blogchat is strictly a place for sunshine and puppies, and I rarely come armed with either.  So I thought I’d take the time to do some much-needed bubble-bursting here, rather than continuing to ruin the #blogchat vibe.

NOTE: If you cry at the sight of anything other than unicorns, hugs and kittens, please close this window now.  You’ll only depress yourself, and you’ll spend the next hour telling me why I’m wrong, when I don’t really care.

Still here?  Great.  Because…

1. There’s no rule that says you have to be nice in social media.

I know, all the important people are.  But I’m not important, so I don’t have to be.  And even if I was important, I’d probably still be an asshole.

(In fact, most people become assholes after they’re important, so the fact that I’m an asshole before becoming important means my assholishness is actually authentic.  And isn’t authenticity one of the social media cornerstones?)

2. All social media is not created equal.

Yes, the tools are “democratic,” inasmuch as anyone with an Internet connection can use Twitter.  But you are not Chris Brogan, nor are you Sara Schaefer.  You are you.  And you matter exactly as much as you matter, to whomever is counting.

To say that there’s “no social media hierarchy” or “no social media pecking order” is ludicrous.  Just because there isn’t an officially accredited list of A, B, C and Z-list bloggers doesn’t mean we don’t all know who they are, give or take a rung.

(And yes, you can be a Z-list blogger and still produce A-list work, and vice versa.  Quality and reach are two separate factors.  In the end, we’re judged according to other people’s criteria, not our own.)

3. I am not required to help you for free.

Granted, some people do it really badly, but yes, social media is a business.  Not for everyone, but for some people.  And no, they don’t have to help you, or give you free advice, or even be nice to you (see above).  Some of the nicest ones do; others don’t.  (Hell, I charge $200 for a lunch.)

Being nice is wonderful, but to anyone for whom social media is a business, what matters to them is paying the bills.  If they have time to be nice, or if being nice is part of their brand — and, therefore, their business — they’ll do it.  And, in general, social media people tend to be overly nice, almost to a fault (usually because they want you to talk about them).

But if you’re waiting for Seth Godin to write a guest post on your Blogger blog that has 2 subscribers because “helping people is the right thing to do,” don’t hold your breath.

Your two readers will be heartbroken if you asphyxiate.

Dig this blog? Subscribe and you’ll never miss a witty insight again.

It’s Thanksgiving week in America, and like most people, I’ll be busy doing “real world” tasks until Monday.  But while I’m out visiting family and eating pie, I’ll also be wrestling with the same soul-churning question you are:

If it’s so easy to make money on the Internet, why aren’t we all millionaires?

Fortunately, Michael Forey must have wondered the same thing, because he’s out to help you and everyone you know become amazingly, stupefyingly rich.  All you need to succeed are $17 and his guaranteed system!

See, Michael Forey makes his living “providing the tools, tips and information Internet Marketers need.”

Granted, by “Internet Marketers,” he means these kinds of marketers.  But let’s not split hairs — especially when there’s so much cash waiting to leap into your pocket!

Michael calls his system Hot Trends, and it’s all in his book, whose cover features a mischievous fireball who wants to make you filthy f*cking rich.

Here’s how Forey explains his system, as read directly from his website:

(Well, technically, you need to spend $17, but you’ll make it back so fast that the space-time continuum won’t know the difference…)

YES! To hell with the BS — sell me something I can believe in!  (Maybe something with a mischievous fireball?)

Remember, people: he wracked his brains over this.  (All of them.)

Translation:  “Lots of people who buy this system will fail miserably.”

Translation:  “I still have no idea what I’m doing.”

If we were in Biblical times, Michael Forey would be leading us through the desert for forty years.  Thankfully, he’s just making us astoundingly wealthy instead.  (Which makes me wonder: if Moses had been born today, would he be one of the top earners in Carbon Copy PRO?)

DO YOU SEE HIS PROBLEM?  HE WANTS TO STICK HIS KNOWLEDGE IN YOUR HEAD BUT THERE’S NO HOLE MARKED “PUT YOUR KNOWLEDGE HERE.” IT’S FRUSTERATING!

That’s right, folks: this system is so easy, even an invertebrate can make a living at it for only 30 minutes a day!  And you have thumbs and a nervous system, so you should be a billionaire in minutes!

(NOTE: I called science to ask how dumb a chimpanzee would have to be to successfully operate a trampoline, but science has not called back.  We’ll have to take Forey at his word on this one.)

This system is “so simple,” it takes 10 videos to understand how to become insanely wealthy in thirty minutes a day?  (Remember what I said about the space-time continuum?  Time has no meaning when your life guide is a mischievous fireball of cash.)

Because when I want to find a prime example of a sub-literate primate, I too immediately find the nearest college sophomore.

Side note: You really get a sense of the father-daughter dynamic playing out around Forey’s table this holiday season, since he’s essentially compared her to a mollusk and a chimp on a trampoline.

Wait wait wait…  If his daughter’s a bright kid, that totally blows the control group!  (In fact, if he’d said she used Twitter and LinkedIn, we might suspect her of being a fellow Internet Marketing Genius.  But we know she’s not, because Forey himself assures us his daughter is “no internet markete”

Holy cow — 8 full weeks is now a year? THE SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM IS SHREDDING ITSELF AND I HAVEN’T EVEN PAID YOU MY $17 YET!!! *scrambles for the checkbook*

Granted, if this system doesn’t work for you, it means you operate at a lower level of brain power than a shellfish, but hey, if you want to admit that, sure, here’s your $17 back…

Open question: should you take financial advice from someone who still thinks you can buy milk for 25 cents?  Or should you be SO MAD that he just reminded you of all those other cafeteria bullies out there that you’re now frothing at the mouth to pay him to help you?

And as FDR himself once said:  “The only thing we have to fear is a retraction of the web’s one true moneymaking scheme.”

… but since the mere existence of this system has already rendered the space-time continuum irrelevant, won’t Hot Trends be around forever?  I, for one, sincerely hope so.  Because if that mischievous fireball of gluttonous cash ever burns out, how else will mollusks and trampoline-bound chimpanzees ever earn enough money to salvage the economy?

For more Marketing Douchebags updates, go to the source.

Last week, I tweeted a link to a blog post I wrote called Deconstructing an MLM Pitch, which detailed one of the asinine ways multi-level marketers pitch their “opportunities.”  That link was retweeted by a few of my Twitter followers, and each of us then experienced what can only be referred to as “Tweeter’s regret.”

Why?

Because we were immediately followed, en masse, by MLM Twitter accounts.

I personally attracted 30 MLM followers in about half an hour, and every time I included the word “multi-level marketer” or “MLM” in a tweet, the process repeated itself.  While these numbers aren’t overwhelming, they are telling — and they obviously cheapen the usefulness of the “followers” metric when gauging a Twitter user’s “influence.”

The process itself makes sense: run a script that’s automated to follow anyone who mentions a key phrase on Twitter, and you’re guaranteed to bloat your numbers, because they’re doing the same thing.  It’s like an endlessly self-perpetuating cycle.  Therefore, if I can gain 30 “followers” without even wanting them, no wonder so many actual MLM Twitter accounts have followings in the 10,000+ range.

But what are all those followers good for?  Not much.  Considering most of them are robotic scripts, and considering most of those eventually get reported as spam and summarily deleted — at least half of my “new followers” were erased by Twitter the same day they were added — they don’t necessarily impact anyone’s Twitter experience.

They just clutter the tubes.

Which begs the question: if a million robotic followers are deleted from the system and nobody wants them around in the first place… how do they ever make any money for the multi-level marketers?

As I’ve learned from my recurring discoveries of marketing douchebags, an MLM (or Multi-Level Marketing) opportunity can find you at any time.  Here’s how I came across one completely by accident, and how my amazement escalated as I soaked it all in.

Step One: The Accidental Discovery

This week, I was searching a generic phrase on Twitter, and one of the many tweets that was returned in my search came from vixen1649.

Miss “vixen1649″ (or Hedy Kristen, if you prefer) is married to Hans Kristen, who shares the same passions as his wife — and some of the same tweets…

And both of their Twitter accounts point back to Hans’s website — or, more precisely, Hans’s spoke off the MLM wheel that is Global Virtual Opportunities.

Step Two: The Homepage Link

GVO bills itself as “The Web Host That Helps You Make Money And Live Better,” which is what most of us already thought GoDaddy did. But it’s safe to say that GVO is more than just a web host — it’s a full-service moneymaking smorgasbord!

Step Three: The “Look Who’s Using Our Service” Blurb

On the fence about whether to buy into GVO?  Maybe you’ll be moved by the inspiring photos of these “top MLM and internet marketers”…

After all, how often do you find a business that promises to “change history”?

Step Four: The Arbitrarily-Priced Goods

So, just what does GVO offer beyond standard web hosting that helps them meet their entwined goals of customer wealth creation and timestream disruption?

Who doesn’t want to save $576 a month? Especially when that number is derived from the arbitrary prices ascribed to GVO’s toolset. That way, if they decide tomorrow that their “Lead Capture and Prospecting System” is now worth $200 a month, you’ll be saving $677! It keeps getting better!

Step 5: The Flashily-Named, Dubiously Illustrated Moneymaking Diagram

Question: If you saw a diagram called the Binary Hybrid Matrix Plan, you’d think it was:

A) The plot driver behind Mission Impossible 4.

B) Batman’s secret plan to take down Superman, “if it ever comes to that.”

C) Something Monsanto uses to make plumper tangerines, or

D) The most amazing wealth accrual system you’ve ever seen.

If you answered D, you’re right. (Although, to be fair, we have no way of proving that A through C are not also correct.)

Confused by the icons? Don’t be: all the arrows point to you getting rich! Or, as the accompanying text explains:

Did you hear that? “You will make a healthy commission to infinity!“ It’s like Buzz Lightyear is managing your 401K!!! (And since GVO has the power to change history, infinity is already here.)

Step Six: The Part Where You Sign Up and Become Filthy F*cking Rich

I skipped that part.

Step Seven: The Summary

So, in a nutshell, by searching for certain keywords on Twitter — seemingly innocuous phrases like “online marketing” or “build social network” — you can discover a magical land of instant wealth and natty diagrams. This is a world populated by smiling men (and their wives) who want you to be as successful as they are (because, according to the illustrated Double Matrix Chinchilla Plan, when you get rich, they get richer).

Time is of the essence, because history is about to be changed forever. So act now, or risk being poor for eternity… or until poor people get their own time machine.

The steady growth in the number of marketing douchebags I stumble across makes me wonder how anyone comes to the conclusion that these kinds of faux-business practices are a legitimate way to make a living.

Then I read a LinkedIn message that made it all clear.

Meet Joshua Boxer.  He’s not your typical Ed Hardy-wearing millionaire.  He’s the owner of Internet Wealth Pros, a moneymaking system that… whatever.  If you’ve clicked that link, you’ve already seen his video that explains it all.

Joshua sent a message to the Social Media Marketing group on LinkedIn, entitled “The #1 Mistake Online Marketers Make and How to Fix It.” And his advice explicitly illustrates HOW and WHY people have come to their current understanding of the way the Internet works — namely, that you don’t actually have to work in order to be successful.

You just have to convince other people that you already are successful.

Got that?  Under this mindset, actually being an expert is irrelevant; convincing other people that you’re an expert is what matters.

This is why I refer to the practice as pre-branding: traditionally, branding is what the public thinks of you (or your company), based on their evaluation of what you do or produce.  But today, people are advised to pre-brand themselves because they haven’t actually done anything.

Again, the kind of Internet Marketing we’re discussing here isn’t the actual marketing of a product, service or other company — it’s the marketing of you, yourself.  Suddenly, marketing yourself is a full-time job.  (“What do you do for a living, Bob?”  “I tell people about me.”  “Ahh, I see…”)

This is where it gets interesting.  Once again, you could have an awesome business or be a great leader, but if you don’t tell people you’re a great leader, they won’t see you as a great leader.  Conversely, if people see you as a great leader, you must be one (regardless of whether or not you’ve ever actually led anyone).

Lesson: what you’ve done is no longer as important as what you tell people you’ve done.

Again: don’t try to brand yourself by actually having a business that people take seriously; brand yourself by going to places where people talk and start talking about yourself in glowing terms.

Your story is important.  Your story need not be true, but your story does need to be compelling.  And nothing is more compelling than telling people how much your life has changed for the better since [inciting business-related incident], because people don’t value results as much as they value the hero’s journey.  (And if you cast yourself as the hero, you win.)

Tell your story.  Tell it everywhere.  Make sure that when people search for you, what they find is the story you want to tell them, not any record of what you have (or haven’t) actually done.

Remember: how you view yourself is how others are going to view you.  So when you tell them you’re a hero, they have to listen.

It’s like the Protestant work ethic being carried out by the illusionist’s hands.  Boxer is right that success takes time.  But instead of spending time amassing knowledge and experience, pre-branding advocates spending time convincing people that you already have knowledge and experience.

Because that’s what pre-branding is all about: building your online empire.  And since the Internet is seen by some as a magical land where people are rewarded for their claims rather than for their work, it’s only natural that you should be able to parlay those fictional claims into a fictional empire.

And maybe, if you pray hard enough, you’ll wake up one day and discover that you’ve become a real boy.

Or at least a real expert.

Leave it to Microsoft to depict their customers as morons even when they claim to be empowering them.

Their new “[Person]‘s [Idea]” ad campaign for Windows 7 showcases “everyday” PC users taking pride in the fact that Microsoft listened to their complaints and built a new, improved OS that incorporates their suggestions.  With this approach, Microsoft presumably intended to:

• Admit they’re aware that their older OS had problems
• Show that they listen to their customers
• Make their customers feel like valued members of the Microsoft team

Unfortunately, these ads hit all the wrong notes.  For example:

Based on this ad, I come away feeling as though Microsoft has the following impressions of its customers:

• They don’t understand technology
• They don’t care to understand technology
• They’re willing to buy substandard products and simply hope those products will eventually improve to the level of efficiency they should already have been at
• They’re lazy

I had a feeling this wasn’t the only ad in the series, and that others would reinforce my suspicions.

Yup.

Here, Kirsten adds another twist to Microsoft’s concept of “customer empowerment”: she downplays any concern we should have about Microsoft “stealing” her idea by letting us know she’s flattered that they did it.  (I wonder if Microsoft would be similarly flattered if Kirsten thought so much of their new OS that she handed out pirated copies of it on a street corner…)

There’s also Steven, whose house is filled with PCs even though they were hell to connect before, and Jack, who’s so proud of Microsoft “using” his idea that he called his mom to tell her about it.  Now we see which virtues Microsoft really values: slavish brand loyalty despite user dissatisfaction and a copious mix of hubris and stupidity.

(If I really wanted to nitpick, I could also touch on the fact that each of the “normal” people in these ads envision themselves as physically attractive paragons of insight during their flashbacks, which implies that Microsoft doesn’t think “normal” people are self-confident enough to think of themselves as being already attractive in the first place.  Or, in some cases, that Microsoft’s idea of “heightened attractiveness” is actually less attractive than the “normal” people themselves.  But, I digress…)

Time will tell if these ads directly impact the public’s perception (and purchase) of Windows 7.  But I’m more interested in what the potential success of these ads says about what Microsoft really thinks of its customers — or what Microsoft’s customers really think about themselves.

If you read the laundry list of asinine behavior I chronicle in Marketing Douchebags, you might think I spend all my free time tracking down assholes.

Actually, they find me.

With rare exception, everything I post to Marketing Douchebags comes to me from one of three channels:

• Someone spams a LinkedIn group of which I’m a member
• I stumble across a spam Twitter account while searching a specific phrase
• I’m the flattered recipient of a spam email

Beyond that, people send me links to people they think are douchebags, and most of them find these links the same way I do.

Bottom line: there’s no shortage of marketing douchebaggery afoot.  (The confession of the Mafia Wars CEO, anyone?)  And not all of it is online.  (Telemarketers, we salute you with a lone extended finger.  And when you try to make us feel bad for the poor, struggling call center monkeys on the other end of the line, it only makes me speed up my search for an air horn to aim directly into the receiver.)

But, really, who can blame them?  Marketing is hard.  No one listens.  There’s so much white noise out there that the only thing a talentless hack can do is SHOUT LOUDER AND PRAY THAT SOMEONE NOTICES.

Fortunately, our economy is allegedly collapsing, so the craven among us can convince themselves that douchebag marketing is, like a rickety and rheumatic Obi-Wan Kenobi, our only hope.  Since there are no good jobs out there, selling people malware and spamming rubes out of desperation allows social media outlaws to cast themselves as digital descendants of Jesse James.  All that’s missing is the public’s admiration of their roguish misdeeds — which, considering those misdeeds are being perpetrated against the public rather than against the corporations who’ve caused these financial problems in the first place, may be a long time coming.

So let’s get this douchebag party train rolling.  From here on out, I intend to update Marketing Douchebags on a daily basis.  It’s the least I can do to celebrate their tireless striving toward a fishnetted and coked-out version of the American Dream.

Besides, it’s not like there’s a shortage.

When I pointed out the idiocy of plagiarizing Chris Brogan, I never thought I’d have to turn it into a series.  But then I saw B. L. Ochman’s tweet about her post for Ad Age being blatantly appropriated by Bruce Turkel, and I realized that lifting other people’s blog content and passing it off as your own is quickly becoming the new hotness in this desperate world of online reputation-building.

A Quick Summary:

On October 31, Ochman wrote an article called “10 Things Social Media Can’t Do” and posted it to her blog.  It was reposted as a fully-credited article on Ad Age on November 2.

The following day, Bruce Turkel reposted Ochman’s article (with amendments) on his own blog, in a manner that caused casual visitors (and commenters) to presume that Turkel himself was the original author of the article.

Ochman noticed this appropriation and tweeted about it, but she also did more than simply whinging about her content having been “borrowed;” she left a comment on Turkel’s blog explaining that he did not have her permission to reprint her article, and requested that he take it down.

To Turkel’s credit, he did so, even apologizing and acknowledging the removal on Twitter.  (This also explains why the only way you can read Turkel’s version of Ochman’s post is through the Google cache, since the post itself has been removed.)

But although this particular situation seems to have been rectified, there are still two troubling points worth noting:

#1: Rewriting Someone’s Blog Post Doesn’t Make It Yours

If you’re handy with tabbed browsing, I encourage you to open Ochman’s and Turkel’s versions of the articles side by side and compare them.  Notice that Turkel has rewritten Ochman’s article, rephrasing her words on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis but otherwise leaving her original structure intact.

Note also that Turkel cites Ochman as the author of the post on his site, but he fails to link to her version of the article itself.  Instead, he prefers to link to her site’s homepage and to the Ad Age homepage, but not to the pages of either site that actually contain her original version of the article.

Why?

If Turkel saw nothing wrong with reposting Ochman’s article as his own, he would have done so without amendment. Instead, he cites her as the author, then rewrites a portion of nearly every sentence.  If you believe reposting is fine, why bother rephrasing?  Unless Turkel intended to claim that by doing so, it allowed him to ultimately claim the “new” work as his own.  (Hey, it works in Hollywood.)

#2 This Is Turkel’s Standard Approach

On October 13, Hadji Williams wrote a post for Ad Age that tackled the thorny issue of minority-driven creative shops fighting to be taken seriously by the general market.

That same day, Turkel reposted Williams’s entire article, again crediting Williams as the original author but failing to provide a link to the original post.  At least in this case Turkel opted to leave Williams’s original article intact, rather than “improving” it the way he tinkered with Ochman’s.

But the borrowing doesn’t stop there.

Scroll down the front page of Turkel’s blog and you’ll see that of his seven most recent posts dating back to September 3, six of them are reposts of other people’s material — sometimes with links to the original article, but usually not.

Why It Matters

Despite my recurring debates about intellectual property and content scraping, the fact remains that you cannot legally pass off someone else’s work as your own.  Call it plagiarism, identity theft or impersonation, but it’s still a crime.

Crediting the original author of a work, but then presenting it in such a manner that a person would reasonably draw the conclusion that the work is actually yours?  Now you’re tapdancing into the territory of copyright lawsuits.*

But even if you couldn’t care less about the legality of all this, consider the implications of perception.  The Williams repost appears on a site called “Turkel Talks,” directly beneath a header promising “expert commentary on managing and building brand value.”

That the site is called “Turkel Talks” implies that Turkel is the one doing the talking, and that the “expert commentary” is his.  Even by going (slightly) out of his way to credit Ochman or Williams (without linking to them), Turkel would still have to expect casual visitors to jump through deductive hoops in order to consciously understand that his content and his commentary are not always his own.  All of which means Turkel’s reputation benefits from the potential misunderstanding of his readers.

Then there’s the misleading “Ad Age Power 150″ badge in the righthand column.  Again, casual visitors who see it may be impressed because it implies that Turkel Talks is one of the top 150 blogs ranked by Ad Age.

But that isn’t the case.

In fact, Turkel Talks is currently ranked #744 by Ad Age as I type this.  But because they make an “Ad Age Power 150″ badge available for any blog they track, Ad Age’s inattention to detail (or transparency) enables blogs that are far lower on the relevancy food chain to make themselves look like heavy hitters.

These actions combine to make it seem like Turkel is either purposely presenting himself to readers in a manner that may not be entirely accurate, or that he’s unaware of the actual impression these actions may have on a visitor.  Either way, they don’t seem like ideal examples of someone who prides himself as an expert in “building brand value.”

In fact, to better undertand Turkel’s motives (and to see just how well Turkel himself understands social media), look no further than the conclusion of his only original blog post in the past month — a rambling hodge-podge of generic advice titled The Mrs. Kravitz Effect in Social Media.  It reads, in part (and emphasis mine):

Social media also lets us become information providers… we can take information that we find interesting, and that we think others will find interesting, and we can retweet or redistribute it. If you have a blog and you find an article someone else has written that you think the readers of your blog would enjoy, it’s quite simple to paste the link into your blog post – giving attribution to the author, of course – and say hey, I think you guys would find this interesting. The problem is there’s so much information out there that it becomes impossible to read it all. So you can now take on the role of editor. You can become a thought leader and people will look to you to provide information that your customers want, and that will make a difference in their lives.

I would have thought this would be self-evident, but reposting other people’s content doesn’t make you a thought leader.  If this is the kind of advice people are getting during motivational speeches from a 25 year marketing veteran, I’m a bit more concerned about people’s understanding of social media — and their intentions toward it — than I was yesterday.

(For the record, if you simply can’t stop yourself from reposting other people’s content in its entirety, this is the way to do it.  It may not save you from getting sued by the unreasonably litigious, but at least you’re giving credit where credit is due: to the original author, at the original source.)

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.

NOTE: This post originally appeared on my old blog earlier this year, but Randy Chambers reminded me of its existence last week.  In light of the ever-growing number of Marketing Douchebags out there, I felt the post was worth repeating.

You may have heard that social media is “all about the conversation.” That may be true in some cases, but not all. In fact, for some people, social media is simply about finding new and interesting ways to be an asshole – it’s Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” as applied to text boxes.

If you’re finding it difficult to irritate people on a regular basis, here are ten tips you can follow to aggravate even more people – many of them strangers!

1. Insult people loudly and publicly. Bonus points if you don’t know the person, but you do know enough to know that he / she / they must be horribly, horribly wrong. This will endear you to everyone else who shares your opinion, and will make you seem like a man / woman / composite persona that’s not to be fucked with.

2. Leave scathing comments in public places. Nothing says “I’ve seriously considered your work / opinion and respectfully disagree” like personal attacks injected into one’s thoughtstream.

3. Always be anonymous. Never say with public faces what’s best typed hidden in private places.

4. Always ignore grammar / spelling / punctuation. Clear and legible disagreements are best left in the classroom. As a person with unbridled truth to share, you’re free of the rules of class.

5. Steal other people’s work. Creative Commons licenses never hold up in court, because Americans know that anything available to the public is fair game. If they didn’t want you to take credit for their work, they wouldn’t have made it public in the first place.

6. Talk endlessly about yourself. In a world of nearly 7 billion people, nothing is as interesting as you. Always find a way to turn topical conversations into conversations about you – especially when you don’t know what people are talking about in the first place. (One great way to do this is to lead off with “Speaking of ___,” and then immediately change the subject to that head cold you’re not quite over.)

7. Namedrop like it’s your job. Because it is. That’s because people may not remember you, especially if what you’re doing is redundant or unremarkable — like, say, being a “social media expert” or “communications guru”– but they’ll damn sure remember who you had lunch with last week. (And by “had lunch,” it’s okay if you forget to add, “in the vicinity of,” or “at the same conference as.” Because even if you *didn’t* technically “have lunch” with Seth Godin, he undoubtedly follows you on Twitter, so he might as well have been at your table when the server girl spilled all that water on Andrew Baron [at the next table].)

8. Pontificate loudly about why all new ideas will fail (or PHALE). And then, if they don’t, take credit for their success by insisting that the creators of said idea must have taken your warnings seriously and changed their business plan.

9. Blame designers for your inability to understand their services. Because if it doesn’t work exactly like Google, Flickr, MySpace or anything else you already know, it’s new, and new design is bad and likely to fail (see above).

10. Make all private emails and messages public. Because if so-and-so had really meant it when they direct messaged you in confidence, or asked you to sign that non-disclosure agreement, they wouldn’t have used the internet for such sensitive communications. As mentioned previously, if it’s on the web — even behind someone else’s password-protected intranet firewall — it’s fair game. (The people have a right to know.)