Here is a lesson in how not to do online negative marketing:
Edmunds.com Sues Texas Marketing Firm For Allegedly Posting Fake Car Dealer Reviews:
Edmunds, which says it manually screens every auto dealer review submitted to its site, claims that Humankind tried to register more than 2,000 accounts and used them to post fake reviews. An Edmunds’ spokesperson tells TIME magazine that the fake reviews from Humankind began in January and an internal investigation found that they were all coming from the same place. Many of the fake accounts haven’t been used yet, Edmunds says. To date, the company has detected 76 reviews and blocked each one, TIME reports.
So, what has the bad-intentioned mediocre marketing firm done wrong in this case?
They did it the easy way. The just made up bad stuff about their competitors, and posted them.
Making up things = not good. You really should try not to do it.
But it is easy to. You just hire some intern or guy in India to just invent whatever you wants, and then posts it under usernames like Rajiv (if they’re stupider) or Roger Smith (if they’re marginally less stupid, but still easily, obviously a fake name!).
You’ll be caught in milliseconds… as these guys were.
So here’s an alternate strategy. Try some hard work: some investigative journalism. Research your competitors. Find every single client. Talk to them. Find out their worst stories. Then SEO the hell out if it.
Works like a charm. I’d recommend you try it one day.
Think about how you win a fight, any fight. You could let all your emotions out and yell and yell. But you’ll likely lose, everyone will think you’re ridiculous and you’ll drain yourself before the second punch. But instead, stay calm and cool and focused on the goal and ask yourself, every millisecond, how to best achieve it. There are lots and lots of subtle ways. That’s how we like to do it.
And of course, while employing all the subtle methods… staying a good guy. It’s hard in this bad world, but we try our hardest to enforce our own moral system on ourselves.
