Hey bros,
I’m sure you all have seen some zombie movies back in the day – maybe you’re a big fan of them. The premise is usually that the heroes are the last bunch of humans left on the planet, or at least in the area, because everyone else has somehow been transformed into a zombie. The zombies try to surround wherever the heroes are, and then turn them into zombies as well.
On the Internet, there’s a similar zombie drama going on, only this one never ends. The ‘humans,’ mostly, are people trying to do business online or to do something creative online. They can be anyone from Google, Inc. to the stay-at-home mom selling her handmade dolls. (The bigger they are, the more zombies they tend to attract.)
The Internet zombies usually maintain some silly home-blog/wall/page on mytwitspotface.com, where they make posts about how much a particular ‘human’ sucks. Like the zombies of the movies, these zombies are trying to pull their targets into their cult of negativity – or at least to destroy any happiness the humans get from doing what they do.
In the movies, there are right ways and wrong ways to fight the zombies, and the same is true in cyberspace. You can’t reason with online zombies, because they’re interested only in making trouble for their human targets. Some zombies are even shills, who actually get paid to whine by some unscrupulous competitor (remember the Yelp scandal?), but much more often they are just your basic losers.
If they aren’t motivated by money, it’s a good bet that they’re just looking for their 15 minutes of fame. I guess that’s understandable, when we live in an age that the media thinks it’s news whenever someone opposes anything. The result is that no ‘human’ can ever identify cyberzombies by their names or by their URLs if they hope to survive. It’s equivalent to pulling your own brain out of your skull and handing it to them.
In my opinion, the best defense against online zombies is transparency and openness. Whatever the zombies accuse you of, invite the rest of the world to ask you about it. Most people are smart enough to figure out that most of what the zombie is saying has no basis in reality, and that the zombie probably has never done business with you at all.
At any rate, I happened across seekbromance.com’s first zombie the other day, and in all honesty, I’m happy about it. It proves that the site’s popularity is on the rise. But to the point, if you hear any rumor about us or about me that doesn’t seem to make sense, you should always ask me about it, either publicly or privately. Don’t depend on only one side of the story.
Later,
-the Blog Dude
