It’s no secret that I’m sort of a tech geek.  Without the plethora of free online tools today, I would never have created a MLM law practice. But now with tools like google ads, facebook, scribd, viddler, etc, any individual can brand themselves, put themselves in front of their target audience, and win them over.  The rules of business have changed, big time!

And the rules are still changing.  I enjoy following tech trends because those trends are empowering movements where small beats big.  If you fail to understand the significance of marketing on the web, you WILL get swallowed by the changing tide.  It’s not a matter of “if,” it’s only a matter of “when.”  Like a herd of cats, empowered entrepreneurs are slowly picking off the elephants.

Google’s decision to launch an operating system is VERY substantial.  People are debating about whether or not this spells the end for Microsoft. First, it doesn’t. Second, who cares? Third, it probably poses a threat to YOUR business.

If you’re not familiar with what an operating system is, it’s a program on your computer that allows you to interface with your files and programs i.e. Microsoft Windows.  When Windows came out in the 80s, it enabled average people with the ability to manipulate PCs and make things happen.  It completely changed business.  When you buy a PC today, there’s a 95% chance it has Windows pre-loaded.  You boot it up, double click the programs and get to work. Simple, right?

Before I dive into how the Google OS will threaten your business, I want to acknowledge that it’s not a novel idea to run a PC on a free operating system. Linux has been around for years. Linux sucks and Linux isn’t Google. So let’s proceed.

When you buy a Dell or HP computer, a large part of the price is attributed to MS Windows. The cost of a PC is not really a barrier for most Americans…PCs are everywhere. But in other parts of the world, computer access is not as ubiquitous due to the costs. My virtual assistant in India has to travel to work to jack into the net. He lacks a computer at home. Why? “Too much money.”

Google makes its money via search ads. It makes a TON of money! It completely opened the doors for companies like mine to service niche markets. In order to get the search dollars, they need people searching. To get people searching, people need computers. As Jeff Jarvis pointed out in “What Would Google Do?“, Google’s only limitations are computer and internet access across the world. The more people on computers, the more search revenue they make. It’s that simple. What’s the best way to get people on the net all across the globe? Offer a free operating system and let people buy computers for $50. All of a sudden, when companies like HP and Dell make dirt cheap computers with the Google OS, the barriers are gone for people in those obscure places in the world. And with Google’s OS, it’ll no doubt lead to new innovations with online applications, making business online easier, cheaper, and more efficient. Business apps are moving to the cloud. Even Microsoft understands this. Google just accelerated the space race to the cloud.

But it’s not you that will benefit by these innovations. After all, you’ve already got Windows or Apple’s Leopard. You’re already tethered to an office that’s hooked to a server. What happens when everybody on the planet has access to an infinite supply of information. Competition breeds innovation, and innovation requires constant evolution from workers to stay ahead of the curve. Auto workers in Flint are slowly figuring this out. In America, we have this mindset that we can build walls around the country and offer our citizens guarantees. We want minimum wages, employment benefits, labor unions, public education. Meanwhile, there’s the rest of the world that’s just waking up to these new, infinite opportunities…and they want it all. And guess what, they’re willing to work at a fraction of the cost it takes to sustain your lifestyle. If 1,000,000 people were granted an opportunity that once never existed, and one person from that million was special, could that one person put you out of business?

Competition is fierce. It’s more fierce today than it’s ever been because now, it’s not just mega corporations competing on a global scale, individuals are. Information wants to be free. Globalization is a tide and tides never stop. In the blink of an eye, the world population will have access to anything they’d ever want to learn. You might think, “Americans have access to better education.” Education? They’ll get exactly the same education from accredited schools…online. What happens when your classmate is from the Philippines, learning the same skills as you, and he only needs $5 a day to live large? Focus on what you can do today to stay ahead of the curve. Be an expert. Serve a niche. Brand yourself, build relationships, be somebody worth trusting. Trust is an asset and impossible to replace. Until you leverage the free tools available to lead a movement and be heard, you’re begging to be picked off by some starving genius in India, Africa, China, or by your neighbor punk teenager living off fruit roll-ups and ramon noodles.

Last week, Oprah’s production company, Harpo productions, filed a lawsuit against more than 50 companies alleging those companies had used their names and images to sell beauty products and dietary supplements containing acai and resveratrol without permission. See below for the actual lawsuit. Among those companies was MonaVie, a prominent network marketing company that sells acai juice products. In the lawsuit, the Plaintiffs spend little time stating their claims against each individual defendant. In general, they reference credit card fraud, fraudulent use of meta tagging for search engine optimization (which is way over my head), and unauthorized use of copyrighted works. They main thrust of their argument is found in the allegation below:

These Defendants are willfully capitalizing on Plaintiffs’ valuable reputation and intellectual property rights to lure consumers into ordering their Infringing Products on the false premise that they have been tested or recommended by Ms. Winfrey and/or Dr. Oz when they have not.  Defendants are fabricating quotes or falsely purporting to speak in Dr. Oz and/or Ms. Winfrey’s voice about specific brands or products that neither of them has endorsed.  Defendants conduct has gravely injured Plaintiffs’ reputations.

As a MLM lawyer in the network marketing industry, it always interests me when a network marketing company get sued. Usually, the alarm bells go off when a company gets sued for operating a fraudulent pyramid scheme, usually as a class action lawsuit or a regulatory action. It’s sort of like driving by the scene of a car accident…you can’t help but stare. In this case, those allegations are never made. But there’s still a lesson to be learned from this lawsuit. Network marketing companies will always be held accountable for the actions of their sales force, regardless if the company condones the behavior or not. In my opinion, monavie will be fine with this lawsuit. If monavie can demonstrate a history of cracking down of false and misleading statements about Oprah’s “endorsement” of monavie (which I’m sure they can), the plaintiffs will have no case. But if the history of enforcement is lacking and monavie allowed itself to benefit from the misstatements, it’ll be a different and very expensive scenario.

I’ve personally worked with Monavie’s compliance department and I know first hand they’re one of the best compliance departments in the industry. With monavie, distributors are required to get all training materials approved by the compliance department before they can use them in the field. If distributors in monavie were using tools that implied Oprah’s endorsement, I’m guessing the tools were unauthorized.

Amway dealt with stronger allegations in both the UK and in the United States with the Pokorny class action lawsuit. Those actions alleged that Amway distributors were purposely misrepresenting the Amway opportunity and luring prospects into other fraudulent schemes. In the UK case, Amway tried arguing that it cannot be held liable for practices employed by its independent sales force. The judge took exception to the argument and made the following statement in the Order:

I do not agree.. . . Amway cannot reap the benefit of such misstatements or misrepresentation without accepting the proper consequences flowing from the means by which that benefit was obtained. It permitted itself to be surrounded with a penumbra of impropriety, and took the advantages to its business thereby gained.”

Since Amway benefited from the misrepresentations made by distributors, the judge said they cannot shift blame.

There’s a lot to be learned from this lawsuit. I know companies that wish they could throw their hands up and blame their sales force, but since it’s a common enterprise between the company and the sales force, they’re all in the same boat. If you’re an executive at a network marketing company, it’s time to tighten those screws on your rusty compliance department. If the department has holes in it, a few bad apples could cost the company a fortune.

Harpo Productions Lawsuit — Oprah & Dr. Oz Suing More Than 50 Corporations

We Americans love media! We love entertainment. We bathe in it. We pay big bucks, sit through the commercials, eat the popcorn and and beg for more. Not only do we enjoy distractions, we crave them. We’re addicted to distractions. We seek them out. Why?

I think the answer lies in some complicated sociological study. One that would be over my head. Maybe the Ken and Barbie lifestyles we seemingly want is turning out to be unfulfilling. Maybe the gap separating our professional lives from our personal lives is growing too large, forcing us to consume media like a drug, numbing the pain away. Or maybe collectively we’ve chosen careers that suck, have very little meaning, or worse, do social harm, and force us to seek out the next crisis.

But the data is in: distractions make us stupid. The cure = focus. Stanford University students did a fascinating study about the affects of media multitasking. The article states,

The researchers are still studying whether chronic media multitaskers are born with an inability to concentrate or are damaging their cognitive control by willingly taking in so much at once. But they’re convinced the minds of multitaskers are not working as well as they could.

“When they’re in situations where there are multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, they’re not able to filter out what’s not relevant to their current goal,” said Wagner, an associate professor of psychology. “That failure to filter means they’re slowed down by that irrelevant information.”

So maybe it’s time to stop e-mailing if you’re following the game on TV, and rethink singing along with the radio if you’re reading the latest news online. By doing less, you might accomplish more.

Translation: time to wake up and take ownership. We’re in the middle of an enormous paradigm shift in how businesses are formed and marketed. Today, anyone can source a product, build a website, put out remarkable ads on YouTube and compete with Procter and Gamble. But in the midst of all of this opportunity, we seem stuck with our noses in our blackberries with a “I’ll do something later” attitude. Meanwhile, we reach for the next crisis, the next season of Lost, our inbox…anything to distract us from carving out our spot in history.

So what’s the answer?

Scribd is the document sharing platform that allows users to broadcast and share their documents on the internet. If you’re a regular reader, you’ve seen it on this blog before. If not, see the sample below. Scribd has been aptly described as a “YouTube for documents.” The concept is simple: upload your Word files or PDF documents to Scribd. Scribd converts them into a readable player and gives you the html code. You, and more importantly your readers, can embed the content anywhere. Below are seven reasons why Scribd is awesome, in no particular order.

1. Branding. Since Scribd displays the article exactly as you have it in Word (or pdf), you can customize the look and feel of the article for your readers. It looks better than static text on a web page. And when other readers share the article, the branding never changes. So be sure to tattoo your logo on your articles!

2. Shareability. Scribd makes your articles more “shareable.” When was the last time you cut and pasted an entire article on your website? Probably never. We’ve always shared links, for sure, but what happens when we want the full article to show up on our site? With sites like YouTube and Flickr, they provide platforms that make it easy for us to embed content on our own blogs on our own terms. Scribd allows readers to easily embed articles on their blogs, post articles on facebook, and email articles to whoever. The easier you make it for your readers to share content, the faster your content will spread. Guaranteed. The most dangerous viruses are the ones that spread the fastest.

Today, it’s important for content creators (YOU) to think “distributed,” like Google.  It makes no sense to hoard premium articles on your personal sites. When you syndicate your stuff on sites like YouTube, Scribd, Viddler, DocStoc, etc, you’re injecting your content with steroids, empowering your readers with the ability to embed the content on their blogs, on their own terms.  With your meatier articles, brand it, syndicate it and fan the flame.

3. Google juice. My greatest fear before using Scribd was whether I would lose some google juice. If I write an article full of good content and links, I want it indexed by Google so I get the search traffic. Since the article is technically hosted at Scribd and not on my website, I was worried that Google would not attribute the content to my site. Google juice is important, especially for my law practice. When you search MLM attorney, I want you to find me and my articles. With Scribd, the article is still indexed on your site, which is pretty thoughtful on their part.

4. Links. How many links are pointing to your website? The answer is a very important factor for google. Scribd offers another platform that enables you to build a profile and link back to your site. It’s just one more digital asset that increases your brand value.

5. Search. Since you can tag your articles with certain key terms, the articles get found on google. Also, people go on Scribd.com all the time to search for content. If someone searches for “network marketing and amway,” they’ll find one one of my articles. Scribd is a great place to go looking for ebooks. When I wrote “Legitimate MLMs or Pyramid Scheme,” it was made “public” a few days before I publicly announced it. When I officially announced it, I had over 100 reads over the weekend, all from people searching on Scribd.com.

6. Portability. Readers can easily take the article with them by downloading it as a pdf. And with a pdf, the reader can easily print the article and read it in the exact same format as the writer intended, no changes. The same cannot be said for static text on a website. The reader will not copy and paste the entire article, will not post it on facebook, and will not be able to save it and print it..

7. Ease of use. Scribd is very intuitive.  If you make an edit to a document and want the changes reflected on your Scribd doc, you simply upload the revised version. The changes automatically appear wherever you have the doc embedded.  Piece of cake.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m a fan. I’m not a paid fan, just a fan that likes the service and appreciates that I can now create content that lives beyond my websites.

Legitimate MLM or Pyramid Scheme: How can you tell?

We’ve all been there. Whether it was a spouse or parent that was pitching an exciting business opportunity, we’ve all been sold an opportunity of a lifetime. And deep down in our gut, we felt…maybe a little uncertain. Is it legitimate? Is it legal? Unfortunately, distinguishing a good network marketing company from a bad one involves more art than science. It’s hard to tell a difference and there’s never a sure answer. I prepared this article to help consumers make wise choices during these tough economic times. The article is also written to be informative for network marketing executives to help them run their businesses.

Legitimate MLM or Pyramid Scheme: How can you tell?