Fionn Downhill – Digital Shenanigans

One of my favorite topics these days is how to sell more search to the tradtional marketer.  I am very passionate about search and I have learned over the years that my passion is not necessarilly shared by the traditional marketer.  One of the challenges we face is learning to communicate clearly with the traditional marketers and I believe as search marketers we have done a pretyy bad job of  understanding their world.  As I said on the panel at SES New York WE need to learn to speak to them and help them integrate search into their marketing mix THEY have the budgets.

This is an interview with Anne Kennedy immedately after the show.

As the school year starts to wind down, many college students are looking for summer work that doesn’t involve fast food or menial labor. Many students see an internship as a way of testing the waters in a specific field while others want the chance to earn a little money while doing something related to their studies. Some of them may find a spot with Elixir.

Elixir has an ongoing internship program that is currently looking for students to work on web and content development in the summer of 2010. The program is designed to offer students the opportunity to explore the field of internet marketing while gaining real world business experience. The internships offer students a chance to apply theories from their studies while learning what it means to operate as part of a business team.

For the past several years, Elixir has worked closely with Arizona State University to identify students with the background knowledge, professionalism, and enthusiasm necessary to succeed in an internet workplace. Students report that their experiences with ElixirInteractive taught them invaluable lessons about working in a professional environment as well as providing insights into the varied world of internet marketing.

I am writing this post to warn anybody who receives a solicitation from this company to manage their online reputation to examine the situation very carefully. Good online repuation management companies are hard to find and they do not need to send out unsolicited e-mails they are busy enough and do not have to resort to spam.   On the 4th of March I received an e-mail from this Company offering me their Reputation Management Repair services as I had a complaint on complaints board.com. This company RepSpinner are based in Australia I decided to simply ignore them.  Interestingly enough complaints board is also an Australian company.

Here is the solicitation e-Mail. The report on complaints board was created on the 3rd of March.

Hello,

I noticed your business is listed on Complaints Board at (link removed).
This is showing when people do a Google search for your company, which
would be affecting your sales. I actually work at a company where we
help people eliminate reports on Complaints Board and any negative
publicity they have from search engines. This way, your potential
customers would find only positive references and good results about
your company when they search for your business on search engines like
Google.

More details about what we do at
http://www.repspinner.com/reputation-management-services.html. I hope
to hear from you soon.

Best regards,

Jessica Edwards
Project Manager & Marketing
RepSpinner

The first clue here that the report is fake is when they describe the owner as a man when clearly I am a woman. Notwithstanding the other rubbish about the owner being out sick etc that is the biggest giveaway.

Yesterday my office received a phone call asking us if we were aware how bad our reputation was on Google. We did some further investigation.  I found  another e-mail in my junk e-mail from the persistent Jessica this time advising me of the help they could give to remove my RipOff Report.

Here is that solicitation e-mail. The ROR was filed on the 2nd of March and Jessica contacted us on the 3rd.

From: jessicae@repspinner.com [mailto:jessicae@repspinner.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2010 1:32 AM
To: Fionn Downhill
Subject: Report I Found About Your Company [On Ripoff Report]

Hello,

I noticed your business is listed on Ripoff Report at http(link removed) This is showing when people do a Google search for your company, which would be affecting your sales. I actually work at a company where we help people eliminate reports on Ripoff Report and any negative publicity they have from search engines. This way, your potential customers would find only positive references and good results about your company when they search for your business on search engines like Google.

More details about what we do at
http://www.repspinner.com/reputation-management-services.html. I hope to hear from you soon.

Best regards,

Jessica Edwards
Project Manager & Marketing

The ROR is a cut and paste of the original complaints board complaint. Today there are more complaints on complaints board site. One talks about us being a Gym and the other refers to our outbound telemarketing services which we have never used and our SEO guarantee which we never give. They refer to us charging credit cards without permission. Every credit card we have ever charged is backed up with an approved Invoice.

Rather than take this online today I called the US number on their website 305 829 6632. The lady was at first helpful and talked about Jessica being based out of their Australia office. When I honestly explained the situation to her she said her Company would never do such a things. I explained that I had a clear trail of events that was extremely suspicious and I wanted her to contact her company in Australia on my behalf.  I wished to discuss it with them in a logocial and constructive way.  I advised her that if she did not help I would have no alternative but to create this post to protect our good name and reputation. She asked me to hold. She came back and said and I quote, “this company has nothing to do with me, this is private number, people keep calling it asking me about these people and I know nothing about them. Do not call me back this is a private phone and it  is waking up my sleeping baby” Then she hung up.

The biggest concern I have with these fake reports is that they somehow seem to be automated. The information is so random it has either been created by a careless human or a robot.   How many more innocent companies are these fake reports damaging. The reports are created to cause maximum harm to these innocent companies. Nothing published about us in these reports is true I can prove it. How many of these companies then buy RepSpinner’s services. The reason people do this is because they can, no other good reason. In an offline world practices like this would be considered fruad and if RepsSpinner did create the fake reports it would be called racketeering but in the online space thanks to the authority Google bestows on these scam consumer affairs sites people can do this.  These sites allow anybody to post anything without any verification.  The very minimum that should happen is that the poster should have to prove they were a customer.   The Company accused should be allowed to defend themselves without having to post stupid rebuttals which only make the problem worse by adding more content to the fake post.  I see it every day and I feel so desperately sorry for the small companies who have been damaged by these practices with no finance or other resources to defend themselves.

RepSpinner obviously does’nt do their research very well targetting a company such as ours and I hope this post is a warning to any other innocent company who recieves their solicitions to tell them to go to hell.

I am fuly aware that by publishing this our good name and reputation may come under further attack by the unscrupulous indivuals who posted those fake reports in the first place whoever they are.  I am okay with that because if my story prevents one person being scammed then its worth it.

My take on the difference between online and traditional PR and the need for the two disciplines to work together to provide better service to the clients.

This is an excellent presentation by Dana Todd the CMO of Newsforce.   They offer Press Release Optimization tools and paid placement on premium news sites.  This presentation is a helpful guide to managing online PR.  Today in 2010 despite the startling statistics Dana shares in this presentation I am still amazed at how far behind the curve tradtional PR agencies are in offering these services.  I am even more amazed that their clients are not demanding it.  I spoke to a fortune 500 company  this week and none of their PR is released online.  They have a major problem with their online reputation and their very large traditional PR agency offers no online services.  Elixir Interactive offers online reputation managent training to traditional PR agencies but have very few takers.  Are they just going to wait until they go out of business before they embrace this new world which has been around for 12 years now.

Today I had a call with an old friend in the UK.  She is off to the Cheltenham Gold Cup festival next week.   It brought back many happy memories of Spring in the UK and many memories (if a little fuzzy at times) of days spent at the Chelthenham, Ascot and Wimbledon events.  I miss spring more than any other season.  We get hot and hotter in Arizona although this year we did have an abundance of rain.   There is something beautiful about the end of winter and the promise that Spring brings.  But I digress back to Cheltenham.  This beautiful regency town in the Cotswolds less than 100 miles from London is England at its very best.  You can find out more about this town at the Cheltenham tourism website.  I hope to get back to the UK this year and hopefully in the summer.  Rain and all its still one of my favovite trips.

I see an article on AdAge  called What to do when your sponsorhsip goes bad.  There is all sort’s of advice on how to protect your brand and avoid mistakes.  There is even advice on an exit strategy.  Well here’s a newflash when you are dealing with human beings there is always a risk, always a risk that they might turn out to be human.  Tiger Woods is fighting an addiction and he has had the guts and courage to stand up in front of the world and admit it.  For anybody who has dealt with addiction either themselves or a watched a loved one they will know how hard that was.  They will know how hard it is to admit it to anybody let alone to the world.  Sexual addiction is no different to any other addiction is is a disease which is categorized by a mental obsession and the phenomena of craving, just like cocaine, alchohol, food, shopping etc.  It is progressive and fatal.  Does anybody in their right mind think Tiger Woods would have done what he did and wreck his life and his families if he had control over it.  I just wish the media would respect what he and his family are going through and leave him alone. My hope is that he finds a path to a healthy recovery and re- build his shattered life with his beautiful family then return to thrill the world with his brillant golfing again .

Last year I had the pleasure of conducting a Webinar for the New Life Event weekend of training run by Shawna Fennell.  The feedback I got from Small Business and attendees was incredible and they were so greatful to have the opportunity to have access to such high quality training.  Shawna does an amazing job putting this event on twice a year and manges to present a speaker line up which matches any of the big shows which costs thousands of dollars to attend.  Why do I do it? To give back to an industry that has been very good to me.  I hear from small business regularly how hard it it to manage their online marketing.  Hiring an agency is often out of the question for many of these companies and individuals.  Online marketing is critical to any business today and this free (yes free) event is an excellent place to go for training  that goes way past the basics.

It is a mystery, as to why the American public forgives some things and not other things, when it comes to celebrities. For anyone who takes the time to “Youtube”, the band Queen is not only searched many times a day, but when one watches those videos, they see that audiences are huge. Freddy Mercury led what some may term, a controversial lifestyle, in a time and an age when so many people may have considered him to be just too controversial.  I simply loved the band and I loved Freddy Mercury.   As a musician and a showman he was the best.  He became one of the most respected performers of all time.  My all time favorite although I loved all Queens music was Bohemiam Rhapsody and I remember as a starry eyed teenager I learned all the words and imagined that one day I would meet Freddy and he would know who I was!  Living in a remote town in the West of Ireland the only reputation I knew about was his reputation as  master showman and talented musician. Now, anything controversial is put online, and those same celebrities the masses would have admired, are put to the stakes so to speak.  

The lives of celebrities are picked apart and spread across the Internet, as if they are not human, and as if they never inspired, us, or me or you. This happened recently with Leif Garrett. The former teen idol and singer from the 1970′s and 80′s now wakes up to news stories, and stories that are blogged about and gossiped about online. This is when online reputation management is required. Actually, if one is anticipating a career in the public eye, online reputation management is something to consider from the get go.

Good online reputation management ompanies monitor negative press, now in the form of personal blogs and even social sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. They look for cases of misuse, of cases wherein a brand name, be that of a product or a person such as a celebrity, a political figure, or the president of a company, is being targeted with bad press, and they resolve those issues quickly and comprehensively. They work to ensure that the negative press will not come up in searches online, and when their services are used as preemptive measure, they ensure that the negative never reaches the top of a search on one’s name or one’s company. In this day and age, anyone planning to deal with the public in anyway, will do oneself a great service to look into the field, and to hire a reputable and experienced reputation management team.

I know they are updating the interface but for three days now I cannot send a message can somebody help. Am I just not “new facebook page” literate!!