With the emergence of electronic media such as blogs, forums, and wikis, many people believe they can control their public messaging by going under ground and posting anonymously. If you have a bad blog post about your company can it hurt to add a comment contradicting this post? How about editing a wikipedia page to further promote your product?
You may think this tactic is harmless, but it’s not. Not only is this practice really, really wrong, but eventually you will be exposed. There’s been a blitz of different articles lately that prove you have to take the bad reviews with the good. Any attempt to build your brand by posing as a consumer will eventually be discovered and any positive buzz built through this method will be returned ten fold in negative publicity.
The Public Relations Strategist just reported on John Mackey, chairman and CEO of Whole Foods, who was caught posting on Yahoo! finance boards criticizing competitor Wild Oats Markets. For seven years Mackey posted on the board in an apparent attempt to drive down Wild Oats stock price and boost up his own. Eventually he was revealed as the anonymous poster “Rahodeb”, and Whole Foods is now dealing with the fall out both in terms of SEC investigations and with their brand credibility. Strategist reports:
“PR experts said Mackey’s postings risked damaging the well regarded Whole Foods brand. The grocery chain goes from ‘being the company that cares about our health to just another company,’ crisis communications executive Richard S. Levick was quoted as saying.”
On the wiki front, newly launched WikiScanner allows everyone on the internet to see the IP addresses from which edits are coming. Corporate giants like ESPN, Marlboro, and Exxon have been identified as editing their own pages for a more friendly presentation on Wikipedia. An excellent Slate piece explains:
“Enter Virgil Griffith, a self-described ‘disruptive technologist’ and future CalTech graduate student. After reading about members of Congress who altered their Wikipedia entries, Griffith thought up a clever stink bomb. Wikipedia pages can be edited anonymously, but the anonymity is not total. When a computer connects to the Internet, it's assigned an IP address. This address can change each time you connect, but organizations typically have a defined range of IP addresses. When an edit is made to a Wikipedia page, the IP address that made the change is recorded. What Griffith did was take the 34,417,493 anonymous edits added between February 2004 and August 2007 and correlate them with the IP addresses of hedge funds, law firms, media companies, the CIA, and the rest of us. He dubbed the result Wikiscanner, and launched it two weeks ago.
…The Threat Level blog at Wired took the lead in gathering the most egregious edits, a dragnet that rounded up the usual suspects. A Scientology IP added a link to the Kurt Cobain page that suggests the singer's childhood Ritalin prescription led him to suicide. An Exxon IP cleaned up the section on the effects of the Valdez oil spill, cheerfully noting ‘six of the largest salmon harvests in history were recorded in the decade immediately following the spill.’ A Philip Morris IP deleted this sentence from a history paragraph of the ‘Marlboro (cigarette)’ page: ‘It emerged as the number one youth-initiation brand.’”
Obviously you can correct clearly wrong or misleading information about your company, but be careful of self promotion or deletion of criticisms. You will be tracked.
And finally cable company Comcast actually hired a marketing firm to do their dirty work for them. Comcast is trying to fight against carrying the Big Ten network and hired professionals to pose as fans against the new channel. A post from sports blog Deadspin provides details:
“Our frustrations with the Big Ten Network have been well-documented, but it doesn't really matter, because whenever corporations argue with each other, the only certainty is that we'll all lose. But it doesn't stop their fighting. And now they're using some unconventional methods.
As reported by The Fanhouse, Comcast -- which doesn't want to offer the Big Ten Network as part of its basic package -- has hired a Web advocacy company to impersonate fans on message boards blasting the Big Ten Network.”
If people didn’t already hate Comcast enough, they now have another reason. That’s not brand building, it’s brand destroying.
There are tons of these stories floating around the internet. Don’t become one of them. If you have any desire to begin “anonymously” posting as one of your consumers, don’t do it. The limited benefit you’ll gain from your comments isn’t worth the potential damage to your brand.
