The truth often weighs more

This is a comment that was published on the site some years ago. It holds true today as it ever did.

Moving On Migrant, Feb 15 2012

I am amazed at how often “exposure” sites are forced to point out the fact that they are corrective and have no obligation to offer balance because their very existence is balancing out the marketing hype which is found elsewhere and which is google-weighted to come up as priority information in search returns. These corrective sites exist to point out the down side of living in New Zealand in one easy-to-find location. They don’t have to discuss positives because the other forums are sponsored by commercial interests and never state negatives, or allow them only with an unwarranted level of criticism.

The nature of these sites was pointed out recently by a poster on expatexposed. Exactly how they work, what their mission is, and why they are not balanced. They purport to help people move to New Zealand, when in fact they are a conglomeration of commercial interests using social networking to channel people to New Zealand.

The “corrective” sites like E2NZ and expatexposed only started in 2007 at the earliest. The marketing was on full gust long before that. The first wave of “fooled” migrants – they are the ones who started sites like these. The ones that were fooled by the nation branding cleverness and careful control of bad information about New Zealand that went along with it.

So posters who tell readers to do their research are not considering that
1 – some of the early fooled migrants could not find the information they needed before they came, it only hit the Net later once people had moved here and suffered great losses, and
2 – even these sites are not easy to find because they are not “for profit” and they do not google bomb.
3 – the marketing is still on, and it is becoming slicker and slicker.

#Resist