When Social Media Attacks
The social media concept has been in full swing ever since the recent Las Vegas PubCon. While the search industry was well aware of its existence, the idea of leveraging social media for promotional reasons was recently acknowledged as a legitimate aspect of SEM campaigns.
One of the primary uses for social media outlets (blogs), especially when it comes to businesses, attempts to exhibit a level of control over the word-of-mouth message being spread about a company or its product. However, what happens if a company supports a combative blog in order to accomplish this goal?
Normally when something like this happens, the backlash is pretty severe - just ask Sony and Wal-Mart. Now it appears we may have a new candidate to add to the pile… Overstock.com. While Overstock’s actions are not as egregious as Sony (whose horrible, fake “All I Want For Christmas is a PSP” video was vomit-inducing) or Wal-Mart’s fake blog fiasco, the idea of executives backing a blog with a sole purpose of trashing Overstock.com critics is questionable.
Before we go further, we should probably give a little background on what’s going on here. Overstock.com was severely criticized by Floyd Schneider, Darl Dumont, and Gary Weiss and each of these individuals are knowledgeable Internet users and their opinions apparently carry some weight.
As a response to these criticisms, the blog AntiSocialMedia.net took these individuals to task, questioning the motives behind their comments while revealing personal information about the three.
As a result, the New York Post wrote an article suggesting Overstock.com executives are behind the blog in question, “ASM’s work has been vocally supported by Overstock’s controversial Chief Executive Patrick Byrne in at least a dozen of his Web posts on the InvestorVillage Internet message board and Judd Bagley, another Overstock executive.”
Does this vocal support for such a blog equate to the same actions exhibited by Sony and Wal-Mart with their fake blogs? Not quite, but the intent is similar. One of the expert suggestions when it comes to influencing a word-of-mouth message is to do so with a blog. However, I don’t think supporting a vindictive blog just because it attacks critics of your brand is the best strategy when it comes to social media optimization.
With all this going on with Overstock.com, it’s no wonder we didn’t see any new Sabine Ehrenfeld commercials during the Christmas shopping season.
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Hat-tip to Threadwatch.
The real question might be how a company should respond when unfairly attacked. If you read that blog you begin to see that it’s more about making those who’ve used their own anonymous blogs to attack overstock.com, whether right or wrong I’m not sure, to take some ownership of their words.
Should different rules apply to companies and individuals?
I think this is a much more complicated question than it appears to be at first blush.
I couldn’t disagree more. This was an anonymous blog engaged in, for the most part, ad hominems concerning a critical journalist.
What ASM was/is engaged in here was the lowest form of cyberstalking. This carries with it potential civil and even criminal penalties.
Further, perusing the reaction on the Internet indicates that this website has been fast and loose with the facts, to say the least. See http://garyweiss.blogspot.com/2006/11/baloney-brigades-assault-on-wikipedia.html
which discusses how one of ASM’s primary allegations was convincingly refuted. Yet ASM continued to repeat the proven false allegation.
The above calls into question not just the wisdom but the legality and morality of this project.
Judd Bagley has admitted that he is antisocialmedia.net. This has raise a number of very serious legal issues for Overstock.
http://www.dealbreaker.com/2007/01/sleazey_mcsleaze_admits_to_sle.php#more
[…] Recently, I posted an entry about social media attacking - a post focusing on the AntiSocialMedia.net blog that many felt was developed solely to harass critics of Overstock.com. […]