It’s early in the morning (during my golden hour) and I wanted to write something a little funny but with a relevant message. Kind of like a Jimmy Buffet song where he says he woke up in his hammock and wrote down a song!
So here is my little tune…
The guidelines are being changed for all advertisers next year and you may notice a change in the kind of testimonials you see on TV and websites, including ours.
The government wants to limit 2 things…
They don’t want people to get paid to endorse stuff unless it is disclosed. Like bloggers getting free stuff to write nice things about a product.
That makes sense to me, although it is kind of common sense that someone on a blog or on twitter that is recommending that you use their affiliate link to buy something is getting paid a commission.
But apparently now you will start to see twitter marking some pages with a saying like AD’s SPONSERED BY or something to that effect.
Fair enough.
And they also don’t want advertiser using specific claims of results from the use of products.
So they don’t want a successful client to say they lost 30 pounds using this machine or that program unless you say that some people that got the machine sat on their lazy behinds and lost no weight at all.
That makes no sense to me. And I thought freedom of speech allowed us to speak our minds?
Are we all so unable to take personal responsibility for our lack of actions? Do we really believe that it is someone else’s fault for the results we get or don’t get.
When we buy something we should know that there is no universal result. All results vary to some degree and by the amount of action taken!
Everyone should know by common sense that results are only based on action and consumers that don’t take action don’t get the results that the product or service offers.
But here is the kind of world I guess we live in now…
I actually heard a client call our office yesterday and complain because he didn’t have business credit yet. And when his file was pulled up it showed that the personal coach that he hired called him 3 times and emailed him 4 times in the last month with no reply back from him of any kind.
And this guy wanted to be rude to the phone person – until we read his file out loud to him. Then he had no response as to why he failed repeatedly to call his coach back.
He just kind of sat their stunned by the fact that we had these detailed records of his total lack of action and lack of any responsibility.
I don’t get it?
Now, I know everyone (including me) buys some stuff occasionally and never really uses it. In fact, I have a Malibu Palates machine sitting in my dining room that is a little dusty. (Don’t even ask me why it is in the dining room or where we eat dinner if we have stuff clogging up the dining room. What can I say, I like to eat out!)
But lets all get a grip and stop looking to the government to tell people that they can’t say something worked because that might lead people to believe it will work for them.
All our stuff works great, if people follow the directions. That’s like anything else in life where you get what you put into it. And we have normal return policies to protect any people that look our stuff over and change their minds.
So now you know why everyone will be changing the kind of testimonials that are used on TV and on websites.
We will be changing some of our success testimonials in the future too. We have hundreds of them to choose from that we get almost everyday from the nice people that are carefully following the instructions in our courses to get business credit.
The testimonial of the future will look more like general statements from people that say they like the course and they like me and they liked the results they got from applying what we taught them.
Thanks for indulging my take on success, Tom.
