There are people out there who take great delight in saying controversial things to get people all riled up. This typically happens on any kind of site where a 2 way conversation takes place, and those people are referred to as ‘Trolls’. These people do this because they delight in what they believe to be the anonymity provided by the internet. Sometimes it’s people working for rival companies that do this, but as Whole Foods chairman John Mackey found out, such actions will eventually come out into the open.

Typically whenever you leave a comment on a forum, or change a wiki page, your ip address is registered. That ip address can lead someone back to your machine, or at the least to your company. One student - Virgil Griffith - decided to write a program that looked at edits made to Wikipedia pages to see who was making the changes. His program found the following (amongst others):

• Microsoft tried to cover up the XBOX 360 failure rate
• Apple edit Microsoft entries, adding more negative comments about its rival
• Microsoft edits Apple entries, adding more negative comments about its rival
• In the 9/11 Wikipedia article, the NRA added that “Iraq was involved in 9/11”
• Amnesty International removes negative comments
• Dell Computers deletes negative comments on customer services and removes a passage how the company outsources work to third world countries
• Fox News removes all controversial topics against the network from the Fox News page
• DieBold, the company that controversially supplied computerised polling stations in the US elections, removes numerous paragraphs with negative comments

So what’s wrong with this then? Well, if you recall our post on Wikipedia, editing your own page is frowned upon, as for editing the page of your competitors, that’s just plain nasty. While these companies may have delighted in causing reputation management issues for their competitors, or have thought that by editing these pages they were removing potential reputation management issues for themselves, what they’ve now done is create potential reputation management issues for themselves. Once this story broke, it was linked to, and written about by many sites, all it takes is for one or two of these sites to rank well for this story against their name, and then not only do they have the original issue brought to the forefront, but then there’s the proof that the company has behaved deceptively. Not something that you want to see ranking for your name, especially when you’re the root cause…

Filed under: Reputation Management, Social Marketing on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 by Simon Heseltine |
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