1. Censor
Barbra Striesland really effectively used this technique to ensure that everyone knew what her house looked like by trying to sue the photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for US$50 million, citing privacy concerns, in an attempt to have a photo of her mansion removed a collection of publicly available photos.
In this one stroke of genius Barbara's actions managed to get over 400,000 people visiting the site to view the picture over the following month and mass propagation of the image and the story throughout online media. It was so remarkable that the effect of trying to censor something and creating further exposure has been coined ‘the Striesland effect’.
What made this so effective?
Essentially thinking in an old fashioned way and assuming that by bringing out some big lawyers and some big scary numbers would be effective against a mass of unregulated publishers who love to write in defiance when people to try to censor them.
2. React aggressively (even if you are in the wrong)
If you want to empower organisations campaigning to change your business’s practices a really great way is to aggressively react against them and cause a media storm around your methods of handing negative PR.
Nestle have recently managed to do this very effectively following a GreenPeace campaign against the use of deforestation-friendly Palm Oil in their products. The result was 1.5m views of the campaign video and 200k emails sent. Nestle was pushed to a point where they felt it would be more damaging not to do change their purchasing policies to ‘rainforest-friendly’ Palm Oil and made a statement of their intent to do so shortly afterwards.
What made Nestle’s strategy so effective?
Nestle did two things exceptionally well; firstly they forcibly removed a campaign video from YouTube creating a news-worthy story about their aggressive censorship practices' which generated lots of publicity for the video causing it to be quickly propagated across the web. Secondly, they created a Facebook page where people were able to vent their anger publicly, and when users used Modified Nestle logo’s as profile pictures they stated that they would censor these user’s posts causing even more negative PR.
3. Bribe
Sometimes if you need to do some serious brand damage, especially if your not the world’s most loved brand already, a good trick is to attempt to 'bribe' writers to give your products good reviews. Microsoft gave this a shot when releasing Window’s Vista to influential bloggers and giving them a top of the range laptop to help them decide what to write, when this raised criticism they u-turned and asked for the lap-tops back. The attempt to influence Blogger reviews and the resulting back pedal caused widespread criticism and caused further damage to Microsoft; a brand already marred with mistrust.
What made Microsoft’s techniques effective?
Bloggers are usually publishing their views independently and therefore their credibility and integrity within their community of readers and peers is very important to them. By trying to compromise their situation as impartial or honest writers Microsoft skipped the middle-man and annoyed the people publishing about them. Their change of mind about the Blogger’s keeping the laptops just exposed a sense of guilt, made them look stingy and gave Bloggers even more to write about, oh and sending them the world's most pretentious laptops complete with cringey ‘Ferrari’ badges didn't help.
4. Cheat
All media loves to expose a cheat; and if you want to undermine the trust people have in your entire product range and what people say about them you can follow Belkin’s example and try to cheat your way to the top of 'user' reviews.
It was unveiled that Belkin had used a contracting service to ask people to write positive reviews of a Belkin product for 65 cents per review while voting down other reviews at the same time; no experience or ownership of Belkin products was required. The uncovering of these techniques did not take long and the result was a mass down-writing of Belkin reviews and a significant loss of faith in the Belkin brand.
What worked so well?
Essentially Belkin is an IT and internet technology company and really should have known better. To advertise for these services in this way was naive to say the least and did not account for how Social Media advocates would react to such a blatant attempt to manipulate ‘user’ reviews.
To summarise
If you really want to cause some damage to your brand you should look to make as many short-cuts as possible; engage with people in an off-hand manner, treat people as if they can easily be bought or act as if you can actually control what is published on the internet.
