Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

Some of the disappointment and controversy surrounding the Miley Cyrus "Best of Both Worlds" tour shows how the Internet has allowed new problems to emerge that must be solved by online marketers.

A very short time after tickets go on sale, they're sold out. The problem is a huge number of tickets are bought up by resellers who not only charge astronomical prices, but keep real fans from being able to see her perform.

Garth Brooks, understanding that potential problem, insisted a percentage of tickets be set aside for sales at physical locations, so his core fan base had a legitimate chance to buy tickets at his one-time concert at the Sprint Center in Kansas City.

With the Miley Cyrus tour, they offered fans a chance to get the first opportunity to buy tickets by joining the Hannah Montana fan club for $30. The problem was there weren't any mechanisms in place to protect that strategy.

Most think ticket scalpers and resellers simply joined the club and bought up tickets in huge numbers, not allowing regular fans the opportunity. One thing that could have helped prevent that was limits on the number of tickets.

So what was a good idea for fans, turned into a negative, as they ended up paying $30 to join the club, and didn't get the major benefit offered out of it.

The one legitimate thing that could be part of this problem, is the tour is so popular that tickets are in reality very difficult to purchase.

That's where something could have been implemented similar to Garth Brooks, where those joining the Hannah Montana fan club could have been offered first choice at tickets at a physical location with an confirmation code from joining the club, or anything that showed they had paid to join. Once that was taken care of, they could have offered tickets at physical locations for local fans. From there they could be offered online.

What all that would have done, was shown the fans you were thinking of them, even if they weren't able to purchase tickets; they would have seen you had their best interest at heart.

For better or worse, there are all sorts of people out there that try to take advantage of the ease of use of the Internet in a variety of ways. We have to think carefully through the various ways what we offer could be taken advantage of that would make it a poor experience for our real customers.

Think of the term "dilution" when contemplating what's happening. If the experience of people using our products or services are being diluted, or in other words "cheapened," we need to take measures to ensure that is taken out of the equation. We need to keep constant vigilance in this area, as people are continually looking for ways to game the system and offer garbage and junk that could hurt our campaigns.

One online marketer recently released a product which helps bloggers gain more visitors to their sites. It didn't take long for so many worthless sites to be included in the offering, he had to hire people just to continually get rid of those garbage sites, which were undermining the purpose of the product.

Look for anything that can cheapen what it is you're offering. The cheaper it is, the more potential it'll become a commodity that ends up having no value to the user. We can't allow that to happen.