My friend and colleague, Lou Abbott, author of MLM — The Whole Truth, created this video about binary compensation plans and why they’re not a plus for REAL network marketers. See if you agree with him or not…

I just read yet another MLM-related blog post that talks about how you should “edify your upline” when talking about them to your prospects. This seems to be a peculiarly-US interpretation of the verb “to edify” — or is it just peculiar to people in network marketing?

First clue: “to edify” someone does NOT mean to “glorify, extol, exalt, worship, revere, reverence, venerate, pay homage to, honour, adore, thank, give thanks to, laud, magnify, ennoble, elevate, dignify, enhance, augment, promote, praise, celebrate, lionize, acclaim, applaud, hail, glamourize, idealize, romanticize, enshrine, immortalize” or any similar expression.

Second clue: “to edify” actually means to “educate, instruct, teach, school, tutor, train, guide; enlighten, inform, cultivate, develop, improve, better, uplift, inspire” or similar.

Does that sound like something you’d try to do to your upline? Or that they’re likely to appreciate from you?

Read the rest of this entry »

Still around – and still illegal!

“Here’s the deal: You kick in $5,000 because you like to give gifts. You’re that kind of woman — generous, powerful, accomplished.

“You become part of an exclusive, by-invitation-only club with like-minded women. As a new member, you know your money will go to the woman at the club’s top level. But you’ll eventually work your way up to the top level and get money from people who come in after you. The problem is that to many people, it sounds like a pyramid scheme.”

In this article by ALAINE GRIFFIN, published in the Hartford Courant on July 16, 2011, and in other articles published by Nehra and Waak, attorneys specializing in MLM, in their newsletter Business Associate Advisory, published 26 July 2011, the seemingly perennial issue of gifting programs is explored in detail — and the usual conclusion drawn: they’re pyramid schemes and they’re illegal, despite what the promoters and participants claim.

Read the complete newsletter here…

A growing number of people have noticed that this blog has been idle since March 2011. So here’s a brief explanation of why I’ve been missing in action for so long, and what I’m doing in network marketing.

I’m not currently affiliated with any network marketing companies. I’m focusing instead on training and support for network marketers everywhere, especially through my FREE Coaching Online service and my PearlMaker Sponsoring System.

Why have I withdrawn from active involvement as a field leader?

The simple truth is my health. Or, rather, my ill-health.

I suffer from several progressive, degenerative — and incurable — neurological disorders, seemingly related, although there’s no conclusive proof at this stage — and I can no longer rely on being available for my downline team members.

That’s not fair to them, so I stopped sponsoring some time ago and concentrated on providing training and support for network marketers everywhere.

It frustrates and disappoints me, but there it is. It’s a fact of life and I have to live with it. Happily, I’m not affected by depression or pessimism. I’m gradually adapting to this new reality. Life is always full of opportunities. The glass is always overflowing.

I still believe fervently in the concept and principles of network marketing. And I’ll continue to be outspoken in shining a bright light on the self-defeating abuses and deceptive practices that sabotage so many people in network marketing.

Over the past couple of days the number of new user registrations for this blog (unverified, I might add) has skyrocketed for no apparent reason. There has been no promotional campaign, no controversial new posts (in fact, no new posts in weeks).

Nothing.

I can find no common thread linking these people. Nor can I find any other kind of reason, such as me joining a new social network, forum or other online community.

That usually tends to lead to one conclusion: someone with more time on their hands than sense has decided to play games, either to make mischief or for some more nefarious agenda. There has been such a steady barrage of new registrations around the clock that it seems clear that a script is involved. I thought of possible causes like the Blogger High Backlinks plug-in, but I disabled that weeks ago.

So I guess it becomes a waiting game, to see what happens next.

I’ve tightened Captcha settings and reduced the verification time for new registrations to 2 days only, so I’ll watch and wait to see what happens next.

The other thought that comes to mind is the fact that I boot and ban more than 30-50 forum spammers a day from a forum I moderate that, since I began trashing these vandals and idiots, has seen Google and Yahoo! spidering the site multiple times every hour.

Who knows? Time will tell.

*** Cliché Alert! ***

Back in 1980 Australia’s largest telco, Telecom, spent untold millions of dollars on a name change to Telstra.

At the time I was advertising manager for a major automotive group that was awarded a fleet contract for supplying hundreds of new commercial vehicles that had to be branded with the new corporate name and logo and I was curious about why the company felt the need to change it’s name at such cost.

I had my suspicions, of course. This was an outfit that was a former government department before it was privatized, and its attitude to customer service was always… well, let’s just say it was toxic. It was perceived by the public as a corrupt corporate citizen. It had been embroiled in a series of scandals that had ruined many small business customers through vindictive practices by middle managers and its reputation had deteriorated to the point where it was universally despised and ridiculed.

What I didn’t expect was for the company’s head of public relations to state, candidly, on a current affairs television interview that the reason for this massively-expensive name change was the fact that so many people loathed the company that the board felt that a new name was needed.

Huh?

Read the rest of this entry »

That appears to be the attitude of Melaleuca CEO, Frank Vandersloot, in response to a post by MLM watcher, Ted Nuyten (left) of http://BusinessForHome.org, about Melaleuca’s vendetta against Canadian distributor Terry Dorfman, who is suing Melaleuca for wrongful termination.

It wasn’t enough to demand removal of the copyrighted image: Melaleuca’s legal department demanded removal of the entire site! (Unfortunately for them, copyright in the site rests with Ted and others, not Melaleuca. But what’s the use of paying lawyers if they don’t push the envelope to the limits for you?)

I created this image (right) and sent it to Ted as a suggested replacement for the offending photo. (Click here to view Google search results for images of Frank Vandersloot, including some that are surely a lot more offensive to him than the one Ted displayed. I have to say that I’m beginning to find photos of Frank offensive, too.)

But overstretching of this kind isn’t new to Vandersloot or Melaleuca. In a pre-litigation action against Idaho-based 43rdStateBlues blog, Melaleuca served a letter of demand on the site’s owners, demanding that they remove an article and identify the author, who used an established pseudonym — common practice in professional journalism. 43rdStateBlues responded by publishing the “take-down” letter, which is also common practice online. If an article is removed under threat of legal action, the letter of demand is published in the public interest. It usually speaks for itself.

Such letters of demand and subpoenas issued under the DMCA are now being questioned and challenged as abuses of constitutionally-guaranteed freedom of information and due process. Nothing new here about laws and orders enacted under the Bush administration, which gave the world such enlightened concepts as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Military Tribunals and Extraordinary Rendition (“spook-speak” for torture-by-proxy).

Read more about it here:

http://www.businessforhome.org/2011/01/melaleuca-versus-ted-nuyten-lawsuit/

We all get ’em… the ignorant morons with minds wide shut. This is a classic. Be sure to share it with your friends. Then go to http://IsItaPyramid.com to learn more about illegal pyramid selling schemes and why they’re illegal — and how they differ from REAL network marketing (and why it’s 100% legal and ethical).

Axel Schultze* is a respected social media commentator. In a penetrating article in this week’s issue of CustomerThink he confirms what I’ve suspected for a few months now: that the social media bubble, like other bubbles over the past decade, is about to burst. The tell-tale warning signs are all there if you know what to look for.

People are recognizing already that the endless hours of watching the incoming streams from Twitter and Facebook or all the status updates on LinkedIn are hours wasted. All the paid tweets and people or agencies, who have been hired to tweet are not going to contribute to the bottom line. And the fan pages people build to get “fans, followers, connections” are just hopes that it will do something for the business – but it won’t.

Yet, there are businesses who not only survived during the economic down turn but actually showed significant growth. What did they do differently as most are also associated with the rise of social media? The answer is SO SIMPLE that most people will reject the truth and continue to look for the holy grail. The answer is “They become more social with their customers”. Socializing is work, it takes time and focus, discipline and a clear understanding [of] what to do and what not to do. And as 80% of humans continue to look for getting the job done automatically and get rich instantly, they will leave the social web because they just learned again and again – there is no free lunch.

He’s no harbinger of doom and gloom, however. There’s plenty to be optimistic about, provided you do the right things for the right reasons.

The biggest benefit of social media is to do more business with more people in a grander geography and in less time than ever before. But it comes at a price. And the price you pay is to be more open, more social, more connected, more interactive, more helpful and more conversational than ever before. And that means you cannot much longer be busy just slicing and dicing your data and aggregate information for even more knowledge about your demographics or aggregate more information to even better target your mail shots and advertising – NO you got to get out there and have a dialog with your customers. No time to do that? You will have a lot of time to think about it when you are fired or your business ceased operations. Being social is work – one customer at a time.

Can you automate?
Automation is sand in the social gearbox.

If you’re interested in social networking as the new Holy Grail of MLM prospecting and recruiting, it will pay you to read this article first before doing anything else — especially spending your money on some of the over-hyped, over-priced social networking courses currently on offer.

If you’re familiar with my 2007 Insight Report, “What the ‘Gurus’ WON’T Tell You! Facts, Fallacies, Fantasies, Fables and Falsehoods of Internet Marketing” (How to separate the ahah! from the rah-rah, ga-ga and ca-ca), this will all sound discouragingly familiar. If you’re not familiar with it, click here to learn more. (Scroll down the page.)

* Social media practitioner, CEO of Xeesm, founder of the Social Media Academy, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, book author of “Channel Excellence”, frequent speaker at industry events, and winner of the 2008 SF Entrepreneur award.

_

This is a post for readers whose first language is not English. I’d like to try to clarify a couple of important points in online promotion using the English language.

English has its roots in several European languages as a result of repeated invasions.

The Romans, under Julius Caesar, invaded Britain around 2,000 years ago. So the original Celtic language became influenced by Latin.

The Angles, Saxons and Jutes from northern Europe invaded during the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, leaving a legacy that overlaid the language with even more tongues. The Vikings later added to the mix.

The Norman invasion under William the Conqueror also saw a heavy Old French layer added to the Saxon language in use at the time. It’s this French influence that I want to consider in this article, because of its impact on so many expressions linked to modern information technology.

Words like niche, cache and fiche (as in microfiche) are all in common use online.

What has complicated the whole issue is the most recent influence on the English language: US English.

Because America has played such a significant role in technological progress, most of the terms associated with it, including online coding and mark-up languages (like html) use US English, not UK English (used by everyone else, including Canada).

America, after the Revolution, decided that it would make English simpler for its citizens. So it introduced a whole range of unconventional spellings, despite it being the only English-speaking country to use them, even today. Words like center and meter replaced centre and metre. Jail replaced gaol. Z replaced s in many instances: realize replaced realise. And so on. (Although inconsistencies still abound. For example, surprise didn’t become surprize.)

But words like niche, cache and fiche — all originally French words — remained intact.

In French, these words are pronounced neesh, cash and feesh.

But English is a strange language, where spelling and pronunciation are determined by common usage, not by any formal rules. So it changes over time. But inconsistencies abound, and we now find ourselves being influenced by US usage…

Niche is now pronounced nitch, not neesh. But cache and fiche are still pronounced cash and feesh, not catch and fitch — although some writers claim that cache should be pronounced caish. (I have no idea why. I don’t know whether they insist on on pronouncing niche as n-eye-sh as in “eye”, or fiche as f-eye-sh.)

Confused?

If George Bernard Shaw were alive today he’d probably want to make them uniform so that the spoken and written language were consistent, as he did in this suggestion for spelling fish as “ghoti”:

• gh = f as in “enough”,
• o = i as in “women” and
• ti = sh as in “addition”.

Hence my headline which, if we apply the pattern of niche = nitch, would logically be pronounced “Scratch that itch before you catch a twitch!” (At least in the USA.)

After thousands of years, we now have a language riddled with inconsistencies and which, at times, means we can’t always write what we can say — and vice versa.

For example, if you were to dictate the next sentence, people would find it impossible to tell which written version would be correct:

“There are three ways to write two.”

It gets even worse when you try to pronounce word-endings like “ough”…

• Is it “uff” as in tough?
• Is it “oo” as in through?
• Is it “owe” as in though?
• Is it “ow” as in plough?
• Is it “off” as in trough?

And it gets worse…

• Is it “off” as in trough?
• or is it “owe” as in trough?

(Local usage can be either, depending on where you live.)

If it bothers you, get over it… you can’t change it any more than King Canute could stop the tide by yelling at it.

As always, it’s a case of “English as she is spoke”.