Companies Create New Strategies to Respond to Brand Bullying

Finding news stories, blog posts and other content about “the problem with user reviews” isn’t hard. Reviews and rankings connect with so many disciplines – marketing, hospitality and increasingly lawyers and legislators – that virtually everyone now has a stake in them. But what seemed relatively simple as a brilliant business idea to connect companies and their customers through the value of review data and the communities that exchange it has become complicated by questions of fraud and defamation.

It’s not that user reviews don’t matter anymore. To the contrary, they matter more than ever, and that’s the reason why countries are looking how to regulate the process better, companies are vigilant about managing online reputations, and reputable review sites want customers to know how they operate.

Social Media As A Weapon

In all that content about astroturfing, pay-to-play review fraud, and court cases that range from high-end retailers caught paying their social media influencers, to companies suing clients over negative user reviews and contractual clauses, there’s one issue that often gets overlooked. Shrabonti Bagchi, writing from India, includes it in her recent and unusually powerful lament over user reviews and the “loss of innocence” that’s tainted the industry – and it’s what she calls “brand bullying” on the basis of vendetta.

There are other definitions of brand bullying, notably in trademark usage, but Bagchi hones in on the growing trend to launch a social media campaign against businesses – or sports franchises or political opponents – in massive user numbers. What it most resembles is almost a DDOS-like attack on targets that are overwhelmed by the volume of negative review information, and lost as to what to do about it.

“Even more egregious,” Bagchi writes in her litany of bad-review-behavior examples, “is the attempt by powerful groups to bully brands and companies by downrating them in order to ‘teach them a lesson.’”

She cites a few examples, including one in which a cultural advocacy group claimed that a Bangalore nightspot refused to play Kannada music. This infuriated the group, which seeks to promote the culture and language of millions of Indians living primarily in the south, and widen the influence of Kannadigas.

When they felt snubbed, they did what everyone does these days. “This semi-vigilante group went on a rampage on social media,” Bagchi explains. They encouraged followers to downgrade the venue on Facebook and Google, and bragged that they had spiked the pub’s ratings from a healthy 4.5 to a 2.5.

That story is familiar to anyone who has ever been asked to boycott a business for real or perceived offenses – a pizza shop in Indiana, a major oil company in Texas, countless retailers in apparel made overseas – but what if, on a much smaller scale, it’s your own company that’s the target on Twitter?

That’s what happened in 2009, when Maytag was on the short end of a dissatisfied customer who just happened to be a prominent blogger with more than a million Twitter followers and told them all about her negative experience – in short, a negative user review nightmare. But if you think that infamous tweet by Heather Armstrong is ancient history, you’d be wrong. It came up again in May, when all the claims of bullying in the American political climate prompted The Atlantic to revisit just how bad it is.

Read More