There's a common counter marketing approach called FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt). When a vendor is having difficulty competing and isn't attracting customers with the value of their product/service, they use FUD to try to drive customers from other competitors. At the end of your blog post you said...
If that came from the "person on the street," it'd be an interesting opinion. Coming from a vendor, that's FUD. Instead of articulating the value you're bringing, you're creating doubt about someone else. It may not have been your intention, but that's FUD.
Hm. What an interesting idea. Two people say the exact same thing with the exact same meaning (and the exact same level of truth) and yet, according to you, one is FUD marketing, and the other isn't.
What an odd idea.
Particularly when the entire idea is to get knowledgeable people to create helpful, intelligent reviews of a range of classes to help people, none of which is directed at any particular training group, but instead at all training groups.
Right, right, that's creating Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Right.
I'll say what I said in my first post in this thread. That sounds incredibly controlling. Who made you the judge of who's knowledgeable enough and who's competent enough to be able to express an opinion?
I'm curious if you think that saying "please don't talk about things you don't know about" and "you are
not allowed to talk about things you don't know about" mean the same thing....?
Or in your life, has no one ever made a polite request for you to stop doing something that you didn't take as an autocractic "You are not allowed to do that ever!"
How are you suggesting identifying those people? By how they write their reviews? Unless you actually know the people posting the comments - all web reviews have an equally low value. Not zero, but really low. If you don't know the reviewers, it doesn't matter if someone says "It was a great class" or they go with your "Zeeb runs a GREAT class in Legal Aspects..."
Hence why I phrased my off-the-cuff suggestion the way I did.
There's no way to know what the reviewer's background or experience is. Even if they list experience, just because it's printed on the web doesn't mean it's true. There's no way to know if the people in a web photo are the same people that wrote the comments, even if they say "that's me in the photo." There's no way to know if someone making an individual comment ever even attended the training (companies hire "specialty" firms to create positive web images).
Right, right, because here on this local forum, people will indeed spend the money and create a persona to do that. If we have an area in which people can have a brief bio of their training and experience, and from that give reviews, obviously the people who do so will all lie.
"If you don't know the reviewers" --- yes, well, that's the handy thing about this forum. Pretty quickly, people start to know each other. So people who have been around for awhile actually WILL know if others are lying. And new people will then know that there are checks on that sort of thing.
What you can do is look at the gist of all the comments and see if overall they are generally positive or not. You can also assume reviews were mostly written by people the class was designed for.
...which doesn't actually solve the problem in any way. As my post pretty much clearly explained.
Pretty unlikely Paul Howe will be taking and commenting on a Nebraska Basic CCW class. More likely to be a new shooter.
Yep. So the vast majority of the reviews of CCW classes, particularly ones from people who have only taken one class, actually contain almost NO useful commentary other than "I liked the instructor, he made me feel good."
There are cases where that isn't true, however, and THOSE reviews would be ones that it would be helpful to know.
Basically, what I'm getting from you is that you think that it is controlling and elitist of me to want to be able to tell which reviews come with a backing of knowledge and experience, and which don't.
I don't recall ever saying "YOU MAY NOT POST" to anyone. It would be nice, obviously, if people who don't know what they are talking about would stop talking on the topic that they don't know. (Maybe you like reading that stuff, but I don't.) That of course is not the same as saying "you CAN'T post."
In your world, does "please stop" mean "I'm not going to allow this"?
I note you seem to have dropped the "don't you have a moral obligation" thing---nice to see you finally figured that one out.
