The Story of Peter and Paul

Take a quick look around the vast social media landscape taking over the internet right now and you could soon start to feel just a little bit dizzy. Nineties style internet marketing approaches such as email marketing, hit and run sales strategies and mass market vampire marketing campaigns are thankfully long gone.

But there's a new ugly and equally off putting monster emerging on the horizon and if you've been on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or Squidoo for a little while you're sure to have come across it at least once already, maybe a thousand times if we're being honest here..


It's what some misinformed network marketers seem to believe is duplication but it's far from it. It's bad replication at best. At worst it's like the return of the dead..


You know what I'm talking about..


Some guy posts a video or sets up a group claiming they can show you how to produce thirty or forty leads per day for your internet marketing system and how they know what it's like to be struggling in MLM because they struggled, in fact they spent thousands of dollars until finally they came across this unique system and now they want to share it with you because they really do care about you and if you just put your name in the form right there at the ..blah..blah..blah


Mike Dillard, Ann Sieg, Randy Gage, the list goes on and the one thing these guys all have in common is their ability to be original. So don't try to replicate them but duplicate what they do.


Still not convinced? Okay, well before you follow in the monster's footsteps maybe you should hear the story of Peter and Paul...


Peter and Paul were brothers who I knew when I was a small boy living in Manchester, England. They were twins in fact. Identical twins. They had red hair, pale, spotty skin and bad teeth from drinking far too much coca cola which they bought by the litre using their mother's rent money. They had few friends and spent most of their time together, like the proverbial pees in the pod. Even so, they hated each other. Being brothers, twins, had done nothing to bring them closer to one another. What others disliked about them as a pair, they despised about each other as individuals and they spent their time together trying relentlessly to get the upper hand.


Peter was the elder of the two by just over three minutes and he used this simple truth to lord over his younger brother wherever and whenever he could, insisting that his name came first in the class register despite it's alphabetical disposition and taking his turn before his brother at the rear of the dinner queue, the bus queue and the queue to kiss Kate West for a pound every Friday behind the school bike sheds.


Paul accepted this fate with increasing bitterness until finally one day the bubble burst and all hell broke...


You see, Paul was greedy. He loved his food and could eat like a shire horse all day and everyday. His favourite food was spaghetti bolognese which was one of two choices every Thursday in the school canteen (the other was cheese pie if you can believe that!). The system suited Paul to be behind Peter on Thursdays. Peter hated pasta as most of the kids seemed to do and so by the time it came to Paul you could be certain there was always a large panful of the stuff left to pile up high on his plate.


And that's the way it was most Thursdays for around a year or so. A pile of spaghetti piled around twelve inches high covered with as much processed parmesan cheese as Paul could shake from the plastic container.


Then one Thursday something fairly ugly happened which conveinced me never to pretend to be something that I'm not...


Peter and Paul took their usual place in the dinner queue, waited their turn with as much or as little patience as they could and when they finally arrived at the pasta dishes, full to the top and brimming with bolognese sauce, Peter turned to Paul and handed him a plate. 'Here brother..' he smiled, as the rest of the school turned from their seats to watch..' I'll help you pile it on high'


'Thanks' Paul nodded, a little bewildered 'don't forget the parmesan'


'I won't' Peter smiled again taking hold of what looked like the parmesan dispenser and shaking it all over the top of the pasta, mountains of it, covering the whole of the pasta with a creamy yellow glow, a fine creamy yellow glow...


The brothers took their usual seats at the back of the hall and placed their plates on the table. Peter took a small bite of his cheese pie and then turned to watch as Paul lifted a huge spoonful of pasta and forced it into his mouth, shoveling more and more down towards the back of his throat the way he always did. Then suddenly..


Paul began to choke, violently, coughing and spluttering like an old man on his death bed. We found out later that Peter had switched the parmesan and replicated the container at home the evening before, filled it with a mixture mouldy cheese, chillies, ground peppers and seven or eight cloves of ground garlic.


The mixture was so strong and repugnant that it caused Paul's body to go into shock and before being taken away to the nearby hospital he had covered most of the schools teaching staff with a splattering of puke and bolognese sauce.


He recovered a couple of days later but left a lesson for every single person in the room that day. Sometimes, what we think looks like parmesan is something completely different.


So, if you're trying to be something that you're not in social media do it in the comfort of your own living room with the pc turned off...

Be unique. Be duplicatable. Be entertaining. Be the best you can be and learn to be better. But most of all be honest.


Neil Ashworth