Scot Duke
This is Part 2 of the 3 part series of blogs on Why I Do What I Do! Review Part One here.
My Journey Began in Golf
After 9 months of studying the situation with how golf was being used by business people I found what most of the business golfers where doing that was turning them off to golf. I did this by playing a lot of golf with business people..yes, it was a hard job since many of them had the personality of a starving used car salesperson. I processed all this information and went back to my friend in the PGA to report what I found was the problem and the solutions.
He suggested I publish a book and provide the world of golf this information. Since I am not a ‘writer’ I struggled with figuring out how to go about doing writing a book that anyone would want to read. After consulting a few other friends it was brought to my attention the popularity of eBooks. So, I took the route of publishing an eBook.
Social Media: Baptism In Fire
The next step was to market the ebook and this is where I started hitting the potholes along the information highway. The experience I gained from being told the wrong way of marketing on the internet lead me to consulting more and more people like me on what to avoid and how to use the internet effectively.
I rapidly made friends who gave me even more insight into what and how exactly most of the businesses who were making a lot of money online were doing to make that money. It was from this information I learned that not all that goes on out here in La-La-Land is pretty, clean, good or true.
There is a lot of people ‘Gaming’ internet primarily due to there being absolutely no way to validate any of the data produced by the businesses marketing the internet. I found businesses buying people to travel around in packs Twitting so to make them look popular. I learned there were thousands of engineers rapidly creating programs that can create thousands of social network profiles in a few minutes. I saw where businesses were paying thousands of people to interact with a person or business so to increase their rankings and influence. Of course the list of things created by the dark-side of the internet keeps growing over the years.
The Crash Changed Everything
In 2008, when the golf industry was stalled in the recession, I naturally turned full time to offering businesses my experiences on how to stay on the road of ‘White Hat’ internet marketing. Now my blog I created in 2003 was becoming seen by more and more REAL people searching for answers to the same questions I had. I also worked endlessly behind the scenes with a number of businesses to help build their online operations to battle off the temptations of using the dark-side of the internet. Each month I would gain additional contacts providing me the latest tactics social networks were using to make themselves appear to be influential.
The recession or depression of the world’s economy has pushed a lot of good people to believe the more popular they appear to be the more likely they will get hired or someone will do business with them. The bottomline is: Social Media is based on being social and influence over a large number of REAL people can’t be bought, it has to be earned.
OH, There is more. Part 3 I will bring you to why and where I suggest people and businesses to Get After It online.
