Perception is everything, especially when it comes to the realm of marketing. Take “SEO.” Terms like “snake oil salesman,” “scammers” and “black hat” quickly come to mind. Before I started working in the industry, I had the same word associations.

On the other side of the marketing spectrum is the trendy title of “growth hacker.” Silicon Valley’s Internet marketers have adopted the title, made it trendy and use definitions like: one who’s passion and focus is pushing a metric through use of a testable and scalable methodology to describe what they do.

At it’s core, I firmly believe in what the term “growth hacker” stands for. I list it on this website and on my Twitter profile. With big data so prevalent, we need to change the way we make strategic marketing decisions in the Web 2.0 world. As data-driven marketing has evolved, so too can the title.

But self-proclaimed growth hackers are often capable of the same evil that SEOs are (fairly or unfairly) known for.

LinkedIn uses confusing terminology and spams their users email contacts, sending “invites” to everybody you have ever emailed.

AirBnB created fake email accounts and spammed Craiglist.

To a growth hacker, those might be smart ways to promote through available social channels. But is it really that different than somebody executing link spam through a plugin? Both are misleading users to grow the reach of a business.

What you call yourself or what your profession is doesn’t make you “black hat” or a scammer. It’s the strategies you create, how you execute them and what moral code guides your actions.