239Protect Your Small Business and Your Professional Reputation
policy, you might consider making an exception to it if you are faced
with an angry customer who has begun to blog extensively about her
complaint, especially if she has made contact with a powerful con-
sumer-oriented blog or reviewer. If you have been contacted by a
consumer blog site, especially a heavily trafficked site, it may be wise
to offer a careful explanation of what steps you took to resolve the
problem and then to make another generous offer to fix it; again,
be sure that your tone is calm and moderate and that you do not at-
tack the consumer. (When in doubt, you can check a site’s popular-
ity with tools like Alexa.com; if a site is among the top 10,000 global
sites, it is extremely powerful; a site that is among the top 20,000
is still somewhat powerful, especially if it is focused on a region or
industry.)
Online Threats Unique to Businesses and
Professionals: Complaint Sites and Hoaxes
While many consumer review sites are important parts of a healthy
consumer economy, not all purported consumer review sites run rep-
utable businesses. Some businesspeople discovered that threats to a
business’s reputation can serve as a form of blackmail and set up sham
review sites designed to bait businesses into paying effectively pro-
tection money. The idea is simple in theory: Create a sham review
site, encourage users to post harsh critiques of businesses, make sure
the negative reviews appear in Google, and then offer the affected
business an expensive “investigative service” to remove the negative re-
view. If the business owner doesn’t pay up, the negative reviews re-
main prominent in Google. The pure form of this scheme is extortion
and is outright illegal, but many sites tinkered with ideas around the
margins of it—especially because Section 230 of the Communica-
tions Decency Act immunizes websites against liability for the content
of reviews posted by users. For example, recent lawsuits have alleged
that the site RipoffReport.com operates an extortionate business by
encouraging negative reports and charging businesses money to rebut
them; no court has yet found RipoffReport liable, but there are several
cases pending, and RipoffReport is alleged to have changed some of
its practices following the litigation.
3
Businesses are particularly vulnerable to hoaxes and urban leg-
ends. Urban legends about a business can spread through e-mail, dis-
cussion sites, and even face-to-face conversations. These stories can
spread especially quickly because they are often colorful tales that
play on our expectations about a business or industry. As evidence of
just how common these myths are, a large section of the urban-
myth-debunker website Snopes.com is dedicated to myths about
major corporations: For example, that there wasn’t really a finger in
Wendy’s chili (the customer put the finger there and was sentenced
to nine years in prison for attempted grand larceny),
4
that Starbucks
refuses to ship coffee to Iraq (it ships coffee to every place where U.S.
soldiers are stationed),
5
that Starbucks offered an online coupon for
a free drink in 2004 (a hoaxster made the coupon up and spread it
online without any company involvement),
6
or that the Coca-Cola
Company allows people to redeem the pull tabs on its soda cans for
charity dialysis treatments (the pull tab has the same scrap value as
the rest of the can, and the rumor is surprisingly persistent despite
the fact that Coca-Cola has no program to provide any redemption
for the tabs).
7
If you have been the victim of an online hoax or urban legend,
your best bet is often to get ahead of the rumor as quickly as possible.
Many major corporations have “rumor response teams” that are ded-
icated to extinguishing myths before they become self-sustaining; you
are unlikely to have a large staff to dedicate to the project, but you can
still stage an effective intervention if you are willing to put in a little el-
bow grease. Your first step should be to clearly debunk the rumor on
your own website: Explain in a calm, rational tone why the rumor is
false and try to provide verifiable facts. If you cannot yet prove that
the rumor is false, find a creative way to show how confident you are
that it is wrong: for example, Wendy’s offered a reward of $50,000 to
anybody who could identify the source of the finger in the chili, even
if it came from inside Wendy’s. Wendy’s was vindicated when it be-
Wild West 2.0240
came clear that the customer herself had added it. Make the link to
this rebuttal prominent on your company’s homepage: Many users
will come to your company’s website to verify or disprove the rumor,
and you need to make the answer easy for them to find.
Next, contact any news organizations or blogs that have repeated
the rumor and ask them to publish a clarification or correction.
Again, use a calm and rational tone to explain why the rumor is
wrong and maybe even why it is hurting your business. The goal is to
set the record straight so that future reporters and readers do not in-
correctly rely on early news stories; the more doubt you can inject
into the earlier stories, the less trouble you will have convincing later
writers to verify both sides of the story.
Next, you may want to set up a system for dealing with com-
ments from the public. If the rumor is particularly scandalous, it is
likely to trigger a fair number of complaints and comments. Use the
same techniques to handle these: for e-mail or postal messages, send
back a form letter that calmly explains why the rumor is false and
presents as many verifiable facts as possible. For telephone com-
plaints, you may wish to instruct employees to direct callers to the
website; doing so reduces the risk of a telephone argument or a large
waste of staff time. If your business is being harassed—such as by
the sending of “loop faxes” or autodialer phone calls—you may wish
to work with the local telephone company to identify the source of
the problem.
Some hoaxes can take the form of manipulated photos or images,
such as a photograph of a fast food sign edited to say something of-
fensive or a composite of several events in one photograph. The same
rules apply: Get out in front, provide a prominent rebuttal, and ex-
plain fully what really happened. The easiest way to defuse a modified
image is to find the (unedited) source image that provided the base
for the manipulation. If your rebuttal shows the original and modified
images side-by-side, most viewers will be easily convinced. Often, dig-
ital attackers simply combine images they found through Google,
which can make it easy to find the original: try searching Google
Protect Your Small Business and Your Professional Reputation 24 1
Image Search (http://images.google.com) using keywords related
to what appears in the photo. If you find a close match, try Google’s
experimental “similar images” tool to look for other candidates
(http://similar-images.googlelabs.com). You may also want to try so-
called reverse image search tools like TinEye.com, which allow you to
upload an image (the attack image) and search for similar-appearing
images anywhere on the Internet. By analyzing the attack image, a
site like TinEye may be able to find the original (unmodified) image.
If you can’t find the original image directly, it might be worth con-
tacting an expert digital photographer (or even a digital forensics ex-
pert) to determine if there is any objective evidence of manipulation.
Some sloppy image-editing techniques can leave obvious edges or
strange blurs between parts of an image composite; if you can iden-
tify these signs, you may be able to convince others that the image is
a fake.
Working Together to Fix Attacks
If other businesses have been impacted by attack similar to the one
launched against your company, contact them and determine if you can
work together to help overcome the problem. For example, if a new
“ripoff site” begins to slander many businesses in your industry or area,
it might be worth talking with the other victims to work toward a so-
lution, perhaps even sharing the costs of litigation. Or, if other busi-
nesses have recovered from similar attacks, it may be worth contacting
them to determine what tactics they used to achieve success. (Of
course, if they failed to recover, it might be worth delicately inquiring
to find out what tactics they used so that you can try different tactics
yourself.) Our lawyers tell us that we are supposed to advise you to be
careful about the antitrust implications of joining forces with compet-
ing businesses, but we think that in most cases there should be no
problem with working together to overcome a persistent or nasty
smear.
Wild West 2.0242
Special Tips for Professionals
If you are any kind of professional, your image is everything. A doctor
cannot separate his personal image from his professional; a photo of
a surgeon drunk when celebrating her fortieth birthday will have a
negative impact on her practice, no matter how sober and careful she
is almost every day of her life and always when she is at work. The
same goes for false negative information about your personal life: A
false smear against your personal character will inevitably affect your
business.
Unfortunately, some aspects of recovery are more difficult for
professionals than for private individuals. The more business-like
you appear, the less sympathy you are likely to get from webmasters
and others who are capable of helping to fix and remove false infor-
mation. Webmasters of many sites are reasonable and want to help
private individuals who have been slandered or wronged. But when
it comes to professionals, their sympathy disappears, and they begin
to fear that they are being played for financial gain. They may be
completely wrong—a personal smear against a doctor hurts just as
much as a baseless personal smear against a stay-at-home parent—
but the two situations inspire completely different reactions in many
website owners.
The same goes if you are a professional who has taken steps to be
more visible in the public eye. If you are an actor or a model or the
like, some people will say that you have decided to take the bad along
with the good by putting yourself in the public eye. If you have done
even some local advertising (think “The Mattress King of Wee-
hawken” or any car dealership), some people will take it as an open
invitation to attack you online—no matter how falsely or unfairly.
You will get considerably less sympathy from webmasters and others
who could help your cause. You can still try, but be extremely cau-
tious and never say anything to a webmaster that you wouldn’t be
willing to put online: Spiteful webmasters have been known to post
Protect Your Small Business and Your Professional Reputation 24 3
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