PR 101

I want to give a huge thanks to Heather Asiyanbi, a Milwaukee-area writer who generously has given her time to become my editor. I owe her a huge debt of gratitude for her work.

A cherished belief of mine about the Internet was crushed yesterday, making me rethink the whole idea of search engine optimization. Let me explain.

I have always encouraged my clients to make sure their customers have a place to comment on the client’s products. It makes sense for a lot of reasons, including the most important – Google rankings. The higher a Google ranking, the easier it is for a potential customer to find one of my clients.

Now, I always thought it was the good comments that drove a customer’s Google rankings. After all, it is illogical to think the bad comments would influence page rankings. Why would Google allow a company with terrible customer ratings to dominate the rankings? If you had a bad experience with a store, you certainly wouldn’t send a friend there.

Well, apparently Google is not so discerning. A Brooklyn-based company known as DecorMyEyes.com has some of the worst customer rankings I have ever seen. Yet it shows up on the first page of a Google search for eyeglasses.

As reported Nov. 26^th by The New York Times’ David Segal, company owner Vitaly Borker discovered that it really doesn’t matter what is said about a company. All that matters is that something is said.

In response to the negative comments, Segal said Borker wrote a blog post using a pseudonym. He thumbed his nose at all of his dissatisfied customers.

“’Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes.com,’”the post began. “I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.”

“It’s all part of a sales strategy,” he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: ‘I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.’”

That burst my bubble, I must say. I always thought Google, and other search engines, looked for the positive results when considering rankings. I assumed that the wizards at Google had created an algorithm that considered the tenor of comments.

As Segal wrote: Which means the owner of DecorMyEyes might be more than just a combustible bully with a mean streak and a potty mouth. He might also be a pioneer of a new brand of anti-salesmanship — utterly noxious retail — that is facilitated by the quirks and shortcomings of Internet commerce and that tramples long-cherished traditions of customer service, like deference and charm.

“I’ve exploited this opportunity because it works,” Borker told Segal. “No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?”

This bothers me. What this appears to mean is no matter what one posts about a retailer, it helps them if they know how to game the system.

There is an old adage from the early days of public relations that goes, “any publicity is good publicity.” The other is, “I don’t care what you say about me as long as you get my name right.”

Those are both from public relations’ dark ages – the days of press agents, three martini lunches, and sometimes out-and out-lies. I had hoped we had moved beyond all of that. This kind of thing could destroy consumer confidence in web searches. That is not good for any reputable company that relies on the web.

I hope Google steps up and figures out a way to deal with this.

This may come as a shock to lot of bloggers, but they are bound by the same rules on libel, slander and defamation as any reporter at an old media daily newspaper. I have written several times that the Internet is the wild west of the law. There have not been a lot of cases dealing with such things plagiarism, copyright infringement, and other areas of the law that govern publishing.

That is changing however.

“It was probably inevitable, but we have seen a steady growth in litigation over content on the Internet,” Sandra Baron, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center in New York, told the Los Angeles Times

“Although bloggers may have a free-speech right to say what they want online, courts have found that they are not protected from being sued for their comments, even if they are posted anonymously. Some postings have even led to criminal charges,” the LA Times reported.

This is my rant for this week. Just because you have a laptop and an Internet connection does not mean you can ignore the rules.  As many bloggers are now finding out, pretending those laws don’t apply get them into a whole heap of trouble.

Yet for some reason many bloggers continue to act like they can write and say what they want. There is something about the Internet and the feeling of anonymity that leads people to write things they would never say in person.

What also bothers me is that many blogger could not define libel if it bit them on the butt.

Here for your edification is the definition of libel from the Associated Press Style Book: “at its most basic, libel means injury to reputation. In some states libel is distinguished from slander, in that a libel is written or otherwise printed, whereas slander is spoken; in either case, the word defamation generally includes both terms. Words, pictures, cartoons, photo captions and headlines can all give rise to a claim for a libel.”

One of the very first things drilled into every rookie reporter are the rules of libel. Lawsuits are expensive. Editors don’t like to use their budgets on legal fees.

“Most people have no idea of the liability they face when they publish something online,” Eric Goldman, who teaches Internet law at Santa Clara University, told the LA Times. “A whole new generation can publish now, but they don’t understand the legal dangers they could face. People are shocked to learn they can be sued for posting something that says, ‘My dentist stinks.’”

Under federal law, websites generally are not liable for comments posted by outsiders. They can, however, be forced to reveal the poster’s identity if the post includes false information presented as fact.

That’s right, you cannot hide behind a false identity. Keep in mind that to everyone at your Internet Service provider – with the exception to those who send you the bill – you are a series of numbers. Those numbers are unique and cannot be changed by you. In other words, they can identify you quite easily.

“There’s a false sense of safety on the Internet,” Kimberley Isbell, a lawyer for the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University said to the Times. “If you think you can be anonymous, you may not exercise the same judgment” before posting a comment, she said.

So, think before you hit that publish button.