> It amazes me how some people on this list have no hesitation doing free
> marketing for XYZ winery (through their recommendations, sharing of
> knowledge, tasting notes, etc.), and yet should a member of XYZ winery
> join on and share a few views, it is met with fierce resistance or
> branded as "stealth marketing".

The difference is in who gains, primarily.

When we (of no affiliation) share knowledge and tasting notes about XYZ
winery, we do not stand to make money off of the altered behavior that
our posts may cause. Thus, the motivation for doing so is more likely
to be altruistic, and what we say is more likely to be unbiased. For
that reason, we place more trust in such posts. But those affiliated
with a winery would benefit financially, so what they say is not likely
to be unbiased. While their posts about (say) =how= to make wine would
be of great interest (after all, they are the experts), their posts
about (say) which wine to buy are more suspect. This is universally
true, and has nothing to do with wine. It is business.

Stealth posts attempt to use the trust we have placed in each other to
the advantage of the poster, for pecuniary gain. I resent that. We
should all stand up against that.

It is too bad that sometimes innocent posts end up looking like stealth
spam. That is the nature of things. But with stealth spam being such a
big problem (I've abandoned several newsgroups because they are
essentially destroyed by it, and I've also had to abandon several
mailboxes to spam too), it's important to ensure that what is shared
here is shared because we want to share, not because we want to make
money off of each other.

Jose
--
The monkey turns the crank and thinks he's making the music.
for Email, make the obvious change in the address.