Andy Sernovitz Powns Huffington Post with Self Promotion while Hyping Blogging Ethics

DISCLOSURE – I am a blogger, not a reporter, more akin to a philosopher and my interests are my own.  If you want objectivity, search else where.  This is social media baby, not the encyclopedia Britannica.

Why did I start out this article with that quirky stupid disclosure? 

The answer is that I was inspired by a Social Media Blow hard, some might even use the term Social Media Douche Bag.  I read the article (image below) by Andy Sernovitz, who has uniquely positioned himself as the head judge or prosecutor in the witch trial of the blogosphere. 

Its kind of like Satan running a witch trial.  (I’m not religious and if you are a satanist I don’t care). 

Andy yaps in the article below about paid blogging and disclosure in blogs.  Weirdly the fool gloriously promotes his interviewee and himself in the article without regard to the 5 links to himself & 1 or 2 to his interviewee.  Watching Andy work is almost like watching the Pope in a porn movie with a glow in the dark condom(did I mention I’m not religious? If I have failed to insult your religion please leave me a comment and I’ll get right on that . . .).

That said, you might ask me why I’m making all the stupid religious references in an article about social media busy bodies? 

The answer is that too many people treat social media like a religion.  Its true that religions are probably one of the earliest forms of social networking.  There is a lot of potential for analogy and example, but I want to focus strictly here on the manifestation common in religion of the pompous hypocrite, or that unique fool that thinks their own damn crap doesn’t stink, steps up on a soap box to preach to YOU why yours does, and why you should LISTEN to them or be damned for ever.   Good thing PeeWee Herman never did any PSA’s against Masturbation, it left the door wide open for Andy to be a bigger hypocrite.

Andy likes the word Damn, so I thought I’d use it a little.  You can let the song ‘Your so Vane’ run through your head every time you read the word damn if you like.

So here is where the hypocrisy above is revealed a bit.  You can also find a little more about how Andy Serbonitz does business on Ted Murphy’s blog.  DISCLOSURE – Note I have more disclosures already than Andy had.  So I repeat DISCLOSURE – Note, no matter how many times you write that word it still doesn’t disclose anything all by itself, you actually have to ‘explain’ something afterwards. 

So here is my Disclosure explanation following the reference to Ted.  I consider Ted a business partner, whom I’ve done business with many times.  I’ve spent a lot of money on Ted’s services and in some cases Ted has spent some money on my own.  Where I come from this is generally referred to as either ‘Putting your money where your mouth is’ or in business circles ‘building trust’.  Ted’s not perfect by a mile and a half, but he does try to improve and largely succeeds, which is why I will do more business with him in the future.   It doesn’t hurt that his services can be effective as well! 

With that said, I do hope that Andy Serbonitz will eventually make some improvements himself and start practicing what he preaches.  Its easy to throw stones (look at my article here for example, I do not savor vitriol, but if you let BS fester in the blogosphere people start to accept it as fertilizer and before you know it they are digging around it for peanuts or something so consider this the antibiotic). 

Now, I know and you know that Andy knows that he is full of it.  The goal with the comments below is to help him come to realize that he needs to do something about it and make some changes in his perspective and tactic so that he can be more effective.  He wants to make the blogosphere better.  Great!  So do I, so do a lot of people.  Let’s get to work doing it instead of feeding people garbage through a prominent blog while getting hefty back links 5 at a time.

The REPLY that coulda, shoulda, woulda been

This started as my reply in the form of a comment on the Huffington Post, but the comment and analysis grew too long.  On Andy’s own site and the Huffington Post, transparency and discussion is not exactly the goal.  The goal is to establish elites that are designated to preach to you, not for you to use your brain and think back at them.

My comment to Andy’s article

Obviously you have absolutely no comprehension of the topic you are writing about OR you simply are citing gibberish as you purposefully break all of your own pompous rules.

In this article you link to Bob Garfield’s site twice without nofollow links.

Nice pay off from the Huffington Post in Google PR Juice – Do you pay off all of your interviewees with links from this site?

But you don’t stop there.  You next link to your own sites without including nofollow links 5 times in this single article.  That’s 5 links to yourself and 2 links to your interviewee.   Great Ethics Andy, I’m sure Matt Cutt’s will happily spank down the Huffington Post for your activities.

Your hypocrisy does not even stop there.  In this article you fail to follow your own advice.  No disclosure at the top of the article that you are promoting your interviewee & promoting your multiple websites & organizations. 

You self promote your own articles with abandon, ironically if a person reads any of your articles that you cite here, they will find that you willfully stomp on people on your own site, when they leave comments for their own self promotion.

Lesson – Its OK for Andy to spout off about things he does not believe. Its OK for Andy to drop links with abandon & without nofollow tags. Its OK for Andy to self promote himself endlessly, but its NOT OK for any of Andy’s readers to do the same thing.

Do as Andy Preaches not as Andy does.

But it does not even end there!

IF a person clicks on the link in this article for your consulting firm it is actually damn funny & I use the word ‘damn’ here with knowing irony because you use a curse word in your own domain name which is frankly childish, might as well drop an f bomb to attract traffic too. 

Way to go you google search deceiver, wonder if you also own the domain name ‘damnIwishIthoughtofthatBS.com’ also?

. . . any way if they actually go to your consulting firm & try to learn what you do, they have to wade through endless copy that ultimately says that you are just a strategy consultant, nothing more & nothing less & you do this so that you won’t have any conflict of interest with creative types. 

“We’re not an agency and don’t have creative services or programmers. We just do strategy. It keeps our advice neutral and unbiased.” src

Yet you have a HUGE conflict of interest because not only are you a consultant, but you are the self appointed ethics referee for the blogosphere, which you apparently don’t seem to understand. 

Why anyone would want to pay for strategy advice from a person that will later come around and act as referee to chastise them is probably only understandable if you understand why some people like S & M. 

Do you really charge people to give them good advice or so that they can come back later & be humiliated for failing to do things you can not even do yourself as evidenced by this Huffington Post article?