How Negative Can You Get?

The short answer is to the question, “How negative can you get with your negative marketing on the internet?” is…. very.

In very broad terms: the lower you go, the more likely you are to win in the short-term. But there’s a trade-off: the lower you go, the more people will dislike you and thus the harder it will be to build healthy relationships.

You can think of this as a practical application of Machiavelli’s old question: is it better to be loved or respected? Our answer is, respected. They probably don’t love you anyway, so there’s no point in pretending they do or trying to get them to. You won’t.

Our rule of thumb is to do everything possible online to completely and utterly crush your opponent’s reputation online — while still following the moral imperative of honesty.

In other words, we don’t make up stuff. We don’t lie. That will cause problems on many levels–who wants to work with a liar? Plus, if we lied, it causes many practical problems: they could dispute our claims, saying they’re false (which they would be, if we lied!).

But if we selectively harness the truth… then the world is at our disposal.

So, the trick is the following: use very creative and subtle means to find everyone who is unhappy with your enemy. Talk to them, one on one. Use the learnings to find out why they hate him: what are his weaknesses?

Then, exploit those weaknesses.

Does this sound like a compelling strategy to you? Send us an email and we’ll crush your enemies online.

It would be a lie if I didn’t admit that I love doing this. Here at Team NOM (Negative Online Marketing), we get pleasure out of this. It’s our masochistic side coming out! The challenge is to do this, all the way, while retaining our complete integrity. This is the line we try to follow.