I Told You So
Time to let the rest of you in on the joke. Earlier this month I had an EDIS Inner Circle coaching call with our students. We were speaking of promoting your business online and one person asked the question” What about online forums?” I replied with “The only forum I know that will add value to your online business is The Warrior Forum, all other I’ve been involved with are a waste of time. People spend more time discussing things that don’t matter rather than just getting it done. The Warrior Forum is filled with some of brightest Internet minds on the planet. If you have never been in this forum, do yourself a favor and read and listen for about a month before making any comments. You will be blessed with incredible wisdom.
I went on to state that most (not all) forums are filled with fake nicknames of nobody’s doing nothing with their life draggging others down with them. Not only that, but people will spend 4 hrs in a forum while successful people are out getting the job done. The difference with The Warrior Forum is you cannot hide behind a fake name and no success. Either you’ve done it or you haven’t. A few people challenged me on this so I offered this: I will post a negative article on my blog about online forums. Watch and see when the venom starts spewing - it will come from anonymous names and phony email addresses.
Chalk another one up for the good guys. No sooner than the post went live did the negative (anonymous) comments start flowing. Hmm, it looked alot like an online forum. Insightful comments but no back bone. Of course we delete all anonymous comments quicker than you can say “Champion.”
If you’re an inner circle coaching client, this post was redundant because we already had a laugh on the teleseminar (thanks Krsity for the paying the $5 Paypal bet you lost). If you are seeing this for the first time, let this be a lesson: don’t waste your time online unless you’re reading the EDIS blog or listening to the Everyday Is Saturday Show - required for all champions 
Seriously, stay out of forums unless you’re adding or receiving value - anything else is a waste of time - which we all know we can’t make more of…
You are a champion.
Sam
January 20th, 2008 at 9:38 am
So you made a bet that you could post something on the internet, and people would disagree with you? Who accepted THAT bet?
This is viral marketing at its finest. You steer traffic to your website by posting an article that will get play on message forums. Then you fun at people, and they come back. And you push products and web forums that you want to get more traffic.
The reason that people use handles on the internet is because there are programs specifically designed to harvest both names and email addresses for spam. They are called spiders. It’s the same reason you will sometimes see people post their email address as “name (at) something.com” - because it’s aimed at thwarting that email address from being gathered into a spammer’s cache.
I’ve also been threatened by people I’ve interacted with online. Friends have encountered stalkers, or worse. I had a guy tell me that he wanted to come to my city and bury a knife in my back. Am I going to post my real name online? No, I will not. I know better. Posting your real name is not bold and manly. It’s silly, and a waste of time, and possibly even harmful.
I get enough personally designed spam in my inbox on a daily basis without handing out more personal information on every website where I post a comment. No, John is not my real name. But if I get any emails directed at “John” or my handle, I know it’s spam. If you want my real name, you can email me for it. And I’ll be happy to give it to you, if you’re a real person.
January 20th, 2008 at 11:21 am
John,
Thanks for the post. I respect your opinion on why you don’t use your real name but I wonder if any has told gurus like John Reese, Yanik Silver, Mike Filsaime, etc to stop using their real names in The Warrior Forum. They have forgotten more about Internet marketing than most will ever learn.
Quick question:
Why would you have threats, stalkers and people wanting to put a knife in your back? What forum has that type of clientele and where’s the moderator? Not to mention, I cannot think of a topic that would cause so much passion?
All the best to you, feel free to use your real name when posting on the EDIS blog, we won’t stalk you
Sam
January 20th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
Religion. Sex. Abortion. Race. Politics. See? It’s not so hard to find a topic people have a lot of passion about.
January 20th, 2008 at 1:29 pm
When I’ve used my name online, I’ve had online stalkers start sending me explicit sexual emails and looking up my personal information. I had one call me at my work (after they’d done the digging to find that information) and then someone began breaking into my apartment.
Giving out your personal information online is something I’ve learned not to do the hard way. Telling people to do so here is very irresponsible of you.
January 21st, 2008 at 6:40 am
Why do some people use their real names on forums? Maybe they work at offices with better spam filters than my Hotmail account. Maybe they’re just plain lucky. Some forums are designed/programmed tighter to repel spiders and thwart that kind of information gathering. In any case, that’s their choice. I respect their right to do so, but I’ve had enough contrary experiences to make me cautious. You’re also talking about people who are specifically in marketing, and WANT more name recognition. I took a stroll through the Warrior’s Forum. Nearly everyone there is pushing a blog, or a web site, or a similar product. They want the traffic. I don’t. And marketing is only one issue at stake.
On another forum where I post, there was a guy who had some rather unpopular views. He posted under his real name. He dropped a few references in passing conversation to where he lived. That was enough for one poster he pissed off to publish everything on the internet he could find about the guy. He was a member of a chess club. He’d run for public office. We were even treated to an aerial photograph of his house on the satellite view from Google maps.
To answer your questions, open forums attract all kinds of people. The losers are fortunately in the minority, but it only takes a few experiences like that before I draw a veil and stand comfortably behind it. A moderator can delete a post by someone who is violently biligerent. In the case where I was threatened, the person was banned pretty quickly.
But people can turn weird suddenly, after a seemingly normal or lengthy conversation. And if they’ve gathered information about you through interaction, even over a short period of time, you would be surprised at how quickly a personality profile can turn into a means of meeting you face-to-face. I’ve had people walk up to me in Seattle, and say, “Aren’t you [X], from [some web site]?” That’s in a city of 582,174 people after posting three pictures of myself in an online profile.
Google is also a marvelous tool. For a while, I used the same handle while posting on a handful of forums. It was fairly recognizable. I stopped doing that when some weirdo came back with an essay-length description of me pieced together from posts I’d written elsewhere. What do you do if they start harassing you on a completely different forum? The moderator bans them. Great. 15 minutes later, with a public proxy server, and he’s back!
Most of the folks I’ve met online are decent, responsible human beings. But I am careful, because not everyone is decent or responsible. I absolutely do NOT recommend people use their real names on online forums, and if you have kids, they should be careful what kind of information they give out on places like Myspace.