Jangro.com

When Idiots Attack

As I mentioned in the podcast I did on friday, the Geekcast.fm crew, as well as myself and a few others acquired a new “fan” last week.

A person acting anonymously under the pseudonym of “Marky Zarc” posted a blog on blogspot, entitled lorenfeldman.blogspot.com including posts that not only made fun of us, but said some pretty hurtful things.

He pulled the site down quickly, perhaps because he got the idea that we were onto his identity. More on that later.

Of course we did grab mirrors, screen shots, and even videos of the entire blog, so while he was able to take down the blog, we’ve got it all saved:

Satirical posts that make fun of people aren’t that unusual and you might even be thinking, what’s the big deal?

Honestly, I don’t really think that any of the subjects of this would have minded the attention at all, but Marky Zarc crossed the line and got pretty hurtful. The venomous posts were clearly fueled by anger, most of it apparently directed toward Shawn Collins and Sam Harrelson, calling Sam a Redneck, making fun of a lisp (non-existant), and painting an unflattering and unprofessional picture of Shawn and the Affiliate Summit conference. The rest of us (Jim Kukral, Todd Crawford, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Loren Feldman) weren’t exactly spared, but we seemed to be a bit more incidental to purpose of the attacks.

We have more, maybe the others will post something as well.

Who is Marky Zarc?

The fact of the matter is that while he surely thought he was acting anonymously, he left enough fingerprints for us to quickly figure out exactly who this is.

He’s an affiliate manager with a program that’s running in Commission Junction, and he did all this from his company, during business hours. This is a large company based in the Midwest US. That’s all I’ll say for now as outing him may not be the best course.

I’d expect a professional in this industry to not let emotions get the better of him and do anything so stupid as to jeopardize his reputation, or worse.

Now I think the last thing any of us want to do is stoop to his level and become the aggressors or jerks.
But do we just let him clean up after himself and walk away? That’s the question, and a hard thing to do.

Lessons Learned

Regardless of the course of action from here, there are a few lessons to be taken from this.

First, it is very difficult to cover all of your tracks on the Internet. If you’re smart, you can do it, but fortunately, most people who are stupid enough to pull something like this are also stupid enough to be lazy or naive about covering their tracks.

Second, don’t shit in your own yard. If you’ve got a beef with someone in your industry, is it worth staking your own reputation on playing foolish games like this? Criticism is fine, and to me, always welcome. But this was not criticism. It was much worse.

Third, as people make themselves more personally visible with blogs and especially video and audio podcasts, it opens them up to attacks from people who for whatever reason don’t like what they’re seeing and hearing. If you’re putting yourself out there, be prepared for the significant possibility that someone’s going to take a shot at you. Thick skin helps.

Unfortunately, this ins’t the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last.

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