Kimkins Controversy - Kimkins Scam

The Biggest Winner

Belated congratulations go out to Tracie, the 2007 winner of YouTube’s Weight Loss Challenge.

This year, contestants have a weekly chance at winning a new video camera. The Diet.com Video Weight Loss Challenge starts soon. It’s interesting to see how many success stories happen with a community that is weighted more towards support and inspiration than it is towards focused strategies. It could be that it is just a numbers game.

Subverting Prejudice For Fun and Profit

This is going to be a very vague post. This post is a commentary on a disturbing trend where people try to use hatred and prejudice as a marketing tool. I do not want to give the campaign the attention that it is designed to garner. If you are in the South West of America, you may have seen or heard part of the campaign. The most insidious part of the campaign is that they have a mole working away at generating protests against their business.

A blogging term that got overused a lot in 2007 was link bait. Often, people would purposely post an offensive opinion that they may not even agree with, just so offended people would link to them. The marketing that I recently became apprised of has an offline element of this same rationale. It is so frustrating to talk about it without being specific, but I dislike it so much that I am going to hold out.

Anti-Kimkins Blogs of Note: Jimmy

I’m guessing that about 0.2% of the people that end up reading my title will react by thinking to themselves Jimmy who?

Jimmy is a low carb weight loss success story who went on to become a pro blogger and the host of a vibrant free low carb community. He has a lot of personality.

Jimmy spent months as a Kimkins affiliate and drew harsh criticism for a part of that time. His audio interview with Kimmer (who at that time was not admitting to her identity as Heidi Diaz) was a defining moment of this saga. I think you can pinpoint the moment when he stopped giving Kimmer the benefit of the doubt. He asked her if the picture of the woman in the red dress was, in fact, her. She said it was, in a tone of voice very much like the one that Heidi Diaz would later use to say No Comment to Chip Yost. The popularity of the audio interview with Jimmy Moore meant that thousands of people had absolutely no doubt that Heidi Diaz was Kimmer as soon as she spoke on camera. Surprisingly, Kimmer continued to deny being Heidi Diaz for some time after that.

Mission Accomplished?

After looking at all the tasks posted on Kimkins Scam I felt a bit guilty about not being as busy as some other people. When I decided to jump in and do my share, I got a surprise. Many of the promotional articles and posts about Kimkins have already been taken down. Here’s a 404 page. All the Kimkins articles at Awesome Articles have been replaced with the following words:

All Kimkins diet related articles have been removed from Awesome-Articles.com in response to the following news story:

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/story?id=4162053&page=1

Kimkins.com is still up and running, but it is reassuring to see how responsive the article posting sites have been.

Anti-Kimkins Blogs of Note: Kimkins Scam

The blogger over at Kimkins Scam is quite a task master. Heidi Diaz and various affiliates have promoted the Kimkins website in a lot of different corners of the internet. Much of this effort can be swept away with a few well written complaints. There are various links and instructions related to this effort on Kimkins Scam. It is part of a broader effort to have the Kimkins site cease to exist.

The blog also has most of the Russian Bride Pics in one convenient location.

Anti-Kimkins Blogs of Note: Slamboard

Slamboard definitely deserves a mention in this series of posts on anti-Kimkins. The photographs of an obese Heidi Diaz were published there first. These photos were taken by PI Robert Charlton of Alliance Investigative Services.

The focus of Slamboard has shifted away from the Kimkins Controversy lately, but the older posts are a great resource for everyone with an interest in the story. There are now lots of vocal detractors with inside information because most of the former insiders fled when they realized or suspected the truth… or they got kicked out for asking questions. Slamboard posts all comments that are not spam. There are several comments from Kimmer’s defenders and they make for an interesting read.

WebHostingChoice.com

If you are having a hard time making a web hosting choice, WebHostingChoice.com can help. The site is a searchable directory of hosts. I like their quick search function. You just type in the maximum fees that you want to pay and the space and bandwidth that you require and you get a comprehensive list at the click of a button. The site works really well and I have no problem recommending it, but I should point out that they always recommend Host Gator. Host Gator is a good host and it is probably the best choice for most people. I just don’t want you to think that the recommendation is based on the values that you put into the search query.

Easy-Poll.com has a New Product

FREE is a powerful word on the internet. Web counters have been available ever since before I had internet access. They were always pretty basic. Easy-Poll.com has a selection of design options so you can have a free counter that matches the look of your blog or website. The image at the left are examples from the site. My experience with this site is that they have relatively basic products that work the way you expect them to. There seems to be some minor glitch where text links to casinos show up on your polls even though they expressly state that this won’t happen. Here is the code that I was given to copy and paste:

The page that had the code on it clearly states that the counter has “No banners and visible advertising !”

Kimkins Exposure

The tangled web that is the Kimkins Controversy was given the cookie-cutter treatment of television journalism a few days ago. It is great that countless people who may have never heard of Kimkins got the basic messages that it is a fraud and that it is not a well researched and safe way of eating.

Actually, I am curious as to how many people would have seen this item on Good Morning America. I was surprised to learn that the TV show is aired in Europe, the Middle East, the Philippines and Australia. The show spent a lot of years as the #1 morning show in America. In November 2006, GMA averaged 5.1 million viewers. It has been a close second to The Today Show for many years.

So it’s quite likely that millions of people saw this news item. The only website that was mentioned and shown on television was Heidi’s site. It may be a bit early to look for the effect of the television exposure on her traffic, but so far it seems to have been minimal.

Does Media Coverage Hurt Kimkins Sales?

The adage that there is no such thing as bad press, has got to be one of the most enduring ‘not quite true’ adages ever. In the moment, the Woman’s World coverage was tremendously beneficial to Heidi Diaz, but it probably hastened the exposure of the fraud. In contrast, the eventual coverage of the fraud by mainstream media might have inadvertently caused a small up tick in sales.

Now that ABC News is working on a story about the Kimkins diet scam, the website will get a big spike in traffic. I sounds crazy to say that this will increase sales when it is a story about a fraud and about a diet that some doctors and dietitians have advised against trying. This reminds me, has anyone ever published an analogy between post exposure Kimkins membership and those women who mail proposals to men on death row?