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Posted by Sarah Bird, Esquire

May It Please the Mozzers,

We’re keeping Legal Monday short and sweet to bring you this breaking news. As many of you know, Valueclick and its subsidiaries, Hi-Speed Media and E-Babylon, have been under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission ("FTC") for alleged violations of the Can-Spam Act and failure to protect consumer’s sensitive information.

(I’ve got to give a shout-out to Shoemoney for originally reporting on Valueclick’s shady practices.)

The Settlement
The FTC announced today that Valueclick has agreed to pay 2.9 million dollars to settle the charges. This is the largest cash settlement since the inception of the Can-Spam Act in 2003. In addition, Valueclick is barred from future violations of the Can-Spam Act. It must also place conspicuous disclaimers indicating that consumers are required to participate and spend money on other obligations in order to qualify for "free" promotions. The settlement also requires them to provide a list of the obligations – such as applying for credit cards, purchasing products, or obtaining a car loan – that consumers must incur to qualify for a free product. Valueclick must also put in place strict measures to protect consumer information. Valueclick’s compliance with these measure must be monitored by an independent party for 20 years.

The Allegations
According to allegations by the FTC, "ValueClick subsidiary Hi-Speed Media used deceptive e-mails, banner ads, and pop-ups to drive consumers to its Web sites. The e-mails and online ads claimed that consumers were eligible for “free” gifts, including laptops, iPods, and high-value gift cards, and included come-ons such as “Free PS3 for survey,” and “CONGRATULATIONS! Select your FREE Plasma TV.”" After being promised the sky, the consumers had to participate in a confusing assortment of expensive and burdensome third-party offers – including car loans and satellite television subscriptions. (Click here to download the Complaint and Exhibits from the FTC’s site.) These deceptive practices amounted to violations of the CAN-SPAM Act and the FTC Act.

According to the FTC, this is its third case targeting the use of deceptive promises of free merchandise by Internet-based “lead generation” operations, and the Commission’s 18th case challenging data security practices by a company handling sensitive consumer information.

What does this mean for Valueclick?

This news comes after last week’s CNN report that Valueclick’s stock fell to the lowest it had been in 52 weeks. Regardless, one has to wonder whether a 2.9 million dollar fine will make a dent on a company with reported revenue of 545.6 million, earnings of 62.6 million, and operating cashflow of 114.2 million. There has been regular speculation over the last year about whether Valueclick was going to be acquired. Perhaps Valueclick’s current dip in value and the final resolution of the FTC investigation will make it a more attractive candidate to potential purchasers. Let’s be on the watch, shall we?

Don’t be like Valueclick

The FTC is being pretty aggressive in pursuit of Can-Spam and FTC Act violators. Make sure you know what’s required of you. You can find out more about how to comply with Can-Spam at the FTC’s site. They also have a spiffy tutorial on what you need to do to protect consumer information.

I’m preparing a post on affiliate marketing coming soon. If you have any questions or concerns about the legal issues surrounding affiliate marketing, or if you’re an affiliate marketer who has gotten in trouble for one reason or another, I would love to hear from you.

Best Regards,

Sarah

P.S. Here’s an interesting account of one marketer who later regretted using ValueClick.

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In yesterday’s post I explained my creative process for uncovering new and interesting search marketing ideas. In this post I want to focus on the other critical element toward becoming an expert: endless experimentation. Of course testing must be done carefully to avoid arriving at the wrong conclusions, which will bring us to another of […]
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Just wanted to share a quick idea for this weeks “VMIF”, and apologize for not being able to post last week. Last Wednesday I woke up with severe pains that ended up putting me in the hospital for a few days because of a need to get my appendix removed. I am still […]
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Some tools exist because they are valuable and remove market friction. Others exist because they are perceived as being valuable, even if they are actually value destroying, or only valuable in rare circumstances.

Valuable Tools of the Trade

Outside of paying for a domain name, hosting, site design, and buying a few links you could create (an ad supported) business online virtually free.

Blogs are easy to post to, easy to subscribe to, and easy to comment and interact with. Keyword tools and analytics services are easy to view and infer ideas and trends from. Searchable email saves time. Google Alerts and feed readers save time and keep you connected with your industry. Many of these tools are free, in spite of offering great value.

Negative Value Software

But there is another class of software that exists long after it is useful or profitable to use, or long before you would need to consider such a solution. Are you still paying for monthly submissions to the search engines? Not all of the solutions are outright fraud though (like monthly search engine submission services are). Even some of the good intentioned tools can still hurt you.

Automated Email

A friend of mine is nervous about launching their first linkbait, and wanted to use this enhanced email software to help automate finding the right people to contact. But until you get some experience in the marketplace you might be paying for value destroying software that hurts your brand.

• One software program my friend bought crashed his computer.
• Another was bought through Plimus. It was purchased, and simply never came…pretty bad after about a half dozen emails and a few phone calls. How hard is it to send an unlock code?
• One of my friends got his account banned by an ISP the first day, when he accidentally misused one such software program. One minute he was doing research, and then he clicked to the next step to refine it, and accidentally ended up sending out about 150 emails in under a minute. Ooooops.

And none of those situations even take into account brand value and risks of a reputation management issue arising.

Automated Bid Management Software

A customer of mine recently asked about what bid management software program made sense to use, as he was new to PPC and wanted to do it right from the start. But if you are new to the game I think you first need to do it by hand so you can understand how it works. If you use bid management software that is optimizing for the wrong things you may end up blowing through a lot of money. It is much harder to learn the ad network + the management tool at the same time rather than learning them one at a time, and in many cases human intuition works better than machines do.

There are a lot of ways to get caught up in the complexities of money saving tools and ideas to where you never do anything. You can’t teach a software program, machine, or employee how to do marketing until after you have done it yourself.

Other Backwards Solutions

• Have you seen people pay to be able to resell some sleazy MLM company’s junk on a 100% duplicate content subdomain off of the corporate site?
• Have you seen people pay for hosting and CMS services that are far worse than they can get for free from other providers or the open source community?
• Have you seen people using expensive keyword density analysis software this year?

What causes people to buy into such stuff - laziness? lack of research? greed?

What (does/doesn’t) Work Well for You?

What tools made your marketing easier? Which ones set you back?

What works well in 2008? What is a waste of time? Twitter? FriendFeed?

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Intense preparation helped Churchill win the war, and it can help you deal with a sudden reputation management crisis. Reacting swiftly and decisively can help minimize the damage from negative search results.
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Search Engine Optimization is not an exact science. It takes lot’s of work and research. Trial and Error. Read through our posts here and try to learn from our experience. We offer some of our insight… news and comment. Please feel free to share your thoughts, and ideas. The site does allow "follows" so post your links.

Zen master Seo-ong Sangsun is the closest to my dream appearance
Tonight I had a dream. In the dream Zen master Seo-ing Singsun spoke to me. I could even ask him some questions. I was also able to memorize some of them and his replies. I decided to write down what I remember.
Zen master Seo-ing […]
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Dear Subscribers and Returning Visitors,
I am again struck by inspiration overflow. This is really a problem combined with very limited time resources.
There are some article ideas in my head or drafts on my PC to choose from. So I need your assistance again. Which one/s do you prefer? Like last time the one with the […]
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Great list of Dos and Don’ts from Khalid.

Tips for before and after starting, tips for topics and promotions, tips for comments and linking, and tips for format and design.

44 Vote(s)

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Confused by the title? Well, I thought I might venture deeper into the SEO myth realm and I uncovered some other SEO myths lists which I mostly liked.
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A decrease in the number of paid clicks made by searchers browsing Google results is because of changes the search engine giant chose to make to its algorithm and strategy, an employee has claimed.
In its fourth quarter financial results, the company acknowledged a fall in the number of responses to its paid adverts.
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Posted by Jane Copland

Caught during a moment of extreme moral ineptitude on Saturday, I did the unthinkable. I signed up to Twitter. I felt like a fourteen seventeen year old who’s been thinking about sneaking into her parents’ booze cabinet with her friends and finally makes the decision to pick the lock. I also felt bad immediately, especially given this and this.

I didn’t try to convince myself that I’d signed up in order to keep ahead of the world’s breaking news, to connect with important people or follow the torrid happenings at SXSW. I did it to add yet another method by which I can communicate with my friends, because we’re lacking those. What I noticed, however, was that there is interesting information to be found via news sites’ accounts, but they blend in all too well with the idle chatter.

Additionally, I don’t want to add news services to the list of accounts that "notify" me when they’re updated by sending me an instant message. (I don’t have text messages turned on because I think it would get very irritating and, frankly, my phone is not up to the challenge.) I also don’t like the idea of news stories popping up as instant messages along with the latest appalling YouTube link that Tom Critchlow has sent me (warning: once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it), or Ciarán Norris‘ startlingly accurate portrayal of a weekend spent using Twitter.

But at the same time, I see the appeal in following the micro-blogging that goes on. Solely subscribing to (following? Creepy) the updates of blogs, newspapers or other sources of information can indeed make for a juicy little RSS feed-type creature. Like a personal ticker of whatever news you’re interested in receiving, you’d never be short of easy blog content again. Unlike RSS, there is no need to wade through hundreds of unread posts, which could be more than 140 characters in length. Smart links from trusted sources, dropped via tinyurl of course, provide a quick insight into what’s going on right now. It’s all very instantaneous.

However, as with every form of social media and RSS, you’ll see update after update that you don’t care about, as well as posts directed at strangers, which add to Twitter’s infamous one-sided conversations. Twitter would become infinitely more useful if you could conveniently message a select group of friends. The @username feature is good for getting a specific person’s attention, but with only 140 characters to work with, it’s hard to get more than two people into one message.

One thing that kept me away from Twitter for so long was the idea that all everyone did was post never-ending updates like, "Going to the store." "Found five bucks on the street." "Thinking about what to have for tea. Pasta, maybe." Useless. Luckily, this hasn’t really happened.

With the impressive total of three days Twitter usage to my name, here are my thoughts on its strengths:

Twitter is great for:

1. Sharing links. To me, this is probably one of its biggest strengths.
2. Getting a crowd together, geography allowing.
3. Sending free text messages.
4. Keeping up with / sharing very new news.
5. Keeping up with / sharing viral, overblown, hysteria-driven gossip.
6. Seeing subjects’ reactions to overblown, hysteria-driven gossip.
7. Meaningless chat. The web is disturbingly void of places to do this.
8. Annoying the holy hell out of Facebook fangirls who get mad at Twitter posts showing up as Facebook status updates and who berate their friends about it until they turn them off.
9. Spawning stupid words.

I assume that many of you have used Twitter for quite some time, so you may enjoy some of the newbie mistakes and lessons I muddled my way through over the past few days:

1. It took me quite_some_time to figure out how to do the @username thing. Just writing out the person’s name after the @ symbol seemed too simple. I didn’t notice the "reply" arrow until Lisa Barone pointed it out. I maintain that it should be labeled. Properly. Like it is at Facebook.
2. I was very excited to learn that I could update Twitter via Gtalk, which is my preferred instant messenger. I was not excited to learn how easy it is to type a reply to Scott into the Twitter window by accident. It turns out that not everything I say to my coworkers needs to be posted on the Internet for everyone to see.
3. I better understand why Rae refers to everyone by their blog name when talking about them offline. After a few days of calling her @sugarrae, I still wouldn’t call her that in person, but I’d not find it weird if someone else did.
4. I thought that Twitter was meant to be a giant status-update of itself, but I use it as an instant messenger. If this pisses people off, I don’t really mind: it’s bad enough that I’m actually using it, so I’ll use it any way I like!
5. Twitter will let you post more than 140 characters in a message. It’ll just cut off the end and make you look like an idiot.

And now for some shameful admissions: Throughout writing this post, I’ve been engaging in various conversations with my friends, all via Twitter. The @username style is now natural to me. I recognise people’s little avatars just as well as I do their Facebook profile pictures. I’ve forgotten most of their last names. There you go, Internet marketing community. You broke me. I’m standing here with my white flag, burning up the @ key and watching my soul slowly escape into a bubbly blue background. But I won’t be truly impressed until you get Rebecca.

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SEOs have officially been fighting fat for charity for a month now, and that means we are halfway to the end goal. Where do we stand?

Judging by the recent blog posts, I think most of us are at a crossroads in our weight loss plans. Many of us seem to be wavering back and forth between losing and gaining, and we end up being a bit stuck at our current weight. Much of that may be because we’ve all been leading some hectic lives lately. Some have been traveling and attending conferences; others have been launching products and sites; and…
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Google has gone and added search boxes in the search results. Based on how often people show they have desired a more specific search result, the boxes will show under the site links on the search results page.

46 Vote(s)

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In social media, marketers need to understand where their brands intersect with the passion points of their consumers. But ultimately, they need to empower consumers to express themselves via their connection to the brand. In most cases, brands can

40 Vote(s)

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Repeated and huge torrents of social media traffic over many months. That’s it. Think about the blogs you’ve observed grow from zero to many thousands of subscribers in a relatively short period of time….

28 Vote(s)

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