All the scandal in the last week about Rep Weiner goes to show just how the internet has changed both the definition of scandal and how reputations can quickly be changed. In many ways, the internet has opened up a whole new medium for inappropriate behavior that, despite best efforts, is really hard to make private. Perhaps the comedian Andy Borowitz said it best: “Thanks to technology, politicians can now wreck their careers without all the bother of having actual sex.”
Of course, this has relevance to digital marketing. Companies’ reputations can be brought down almost as quickly as a politicans with poor customer service or some poorly handled incident. Just as the women who received Rep Weiner’s tweets will now forever have their online reputation linked with this event- (can you imagine googling these women 20 years from now and NOT having this incident come up as the #1 hit?)- so, too, does a failure on a part of a company stick around for longer now. All the bad PR still lingers, searchable, on the net, even with any subsequent good PR trying to offset it. Also, surely it must be easier to generate negative reviews, reactions and posts from customers than positive ones?
Additionally, this reminds me of an article in the NYTimes several months ago. An eye glass company in NYC intentionally treated its customer terribly, essentially stealing money from them and providing low quality products. Their motivation? To generate so many poor reviews and posts that they would come to the top of a Google search!
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