Words: Ashley Rigg
Published: 17th July 2008
There’s no smoke without fire
“There’s no smoke without fire”. The UK libel laws exist to protect hard-won reputations precisely because people believe this idiom. Anonymous internet users can make malicious posts on highly visible internet forums and cause considerable damage to your commercial interests. It’s a serious issue and one that could potentially affect anyone working in the industry. The question is what do you do about it if and when it happens to you?
The last resort
The last resort is to take legal action. The most high-profile example is Harlequin Property’s current
battle with Singing Pig. After temporarily closing the forum last week by taking action against their Internet Service Provider (ISP), they are currently undertaking proceedings against the forum owner, David Beard, and former client and forum contributor Bryan Stevens. After two years of polite requests, they are “fed up of playing Mr Nice Guy”, according to Harlequin Marketing Director, Dave Ames.
Catching your competitors in the act
Overseas property can be a dirty business and Ames believes they have been singled out for a smear campaign by ill-meaning competitors due to their high profile and success. According to reputation management expert
Tim Ireland, this can be a serious problem. If you think this is happening to you, he recommends enlisting the help of an IT professional to catch your competitors in the act. “You can post on the forum, inserting a picture on the post which is hosted on your server. When someone views or replies to the post, your server log files can be used to view the IP address of the poster, which can lead you back to the culprit,” he says.
It is not always necessary to employ such complex tactics. Posters with vested interests can often get lazy and leaves clues to their identity like this
Burger King vice-president who used his daughter’s identity to initiate a smear campaign.
When customers are the “problem”
It can be very difficult to identify posters as they often post anonymously or use pseudonyms. If you identify that customers are the source of the posts, “it’s important to address the problem,” states Overseas Property Centres’ Online Director, Jake Holloway. He works with Harlequin Property and says “they are very professional and always pay on time”. Holloway suggests that one of the reasons Harlequin could be having problems is because their products are so sophisticated, which makes them difficult to understand. His team spends considerable time training staff on the Harlequin offer and visiting their properties. “This may not always be the case [with other agents],” he says.
Common sense says that issues will arise if customer expectations are not in line with the reality of what you can deliver. Investing time in training and managing client expectations seem key to managing your “internet reputation” in the long term.
Damage limitation
Addressing problems at source is obviously the ideal solution but this is not always possible. Rightly or wrongly, bigger companies are always more vulnerable to negative publicity just because of who they are. It’s also easy for one disgruntled customer to create an unbalanced or unrepresentative impression.
As forums have such good link profiles, posts containing your company name often come up in the first page of results when users search for your brand name. This can be extremely damaging. If you think you are vulnerable to this, taking defensive measures to try and fill the search results with websites that are positive about your company is a good strategy.
Although he has never experienced these issues with Overseas Property Centres, Holloway recommends creating a page dedicated to addressing any negative comments with genuine testimonials from satisfied customers and then bidding for top position on Google Adwords for terms like “brand name issues”, “brand name problems” etc., to put your side of the story across.
Tim Ireland is more sceptical about the value of paid search as it takes such a small proportion of the clicks. He recommends donating to a charity of your choice on the condition they create a page dedicated to your business. “The page will often rank highly for your brand name and it’s good karma. Everyone wins,” he says.
Other ideas you could try include creating websites containing your brand name in the URL. For example we could create a site called www.globaledgemarketing.co.uk. You can usually get websites to rank for brand related terms like this with just directory links within three or four months. Google allows one site to occupy two positions in the search results. By creating a number of sites like this you begin to crowd out other potentially less favourable search results.
Your most powerful weapon
Damage limitation will only get you so far. Word-of-mouth marketing is your most powerful weapon and your potential Achilles heel. The internet raises the stakes as information is freely available to anyone who has the inclination to find to it. Legal action is risky as it can often back-fire and discussion can move offshore, away from the reaches of UK libel law. Managing customer expectations and investing in exceptional customer service may be the only long-term solution to navigating your way through the choppy waters of the internet.
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