Brand Nightmares

Having your website hacked is a bad dream capable of conjuring up a Freddy Krueger-esque series of terrors, but it doesn’t take a sophisticated hacker to bring down all of your hard work in building a brand. Something as seemingly simple as an unclaimed Google My Business (GMB) page can be a witches brew of disaster as well.

Just ask the folks of the Gretna Public School System.

High School Hijinks with Google My Business

Pranksters hijacked Gretna High School’s GMB page and renamed the school Gretna Catholic High School, thus opening the floodgates for a snarkfest of humorous — at least to the students — comments. “I feel so much closer to jesus and to the lord out (sic) savor because of Gretna Catholic. PRAISE JESUS!” one reviewer quipped. “A great place to repent your sins,” another added.

When we first heard of this from the parent of a high school student, we immediately contacted Gretna Publics Schools, where they were well aware of the situation. Their Google My Business page has since been claimed and we’re hopeful they’re taking the proper steps to address the inappropriate reviews.

We then became curious about how many other area high schools were equally as vulnerable.

The results were not pretty.

We looked at GMB pages for 34 area high schools and found that 28 of them had not claimed their GMB pages, perhaps the single most important identity on the web.

But our exploration of the digital presence of local schools didn’t end with just the text information. The satellite image on the Google Maps space of one high school reveals that tricksters had etched into the baseball field’s deep right field turf (Perhaps using weed killer as their medium?), a gargantuan outline of … ahem … We’ll leave it at that. Fortunately, that school has also claimed it’s Google My Business page and we’re hopeful they’re addressing the issue with Google.

Being an area leader in digital marketing services, we’ve run into our fair share of horror stories, so let’s take a look at a few of our other … uh, “favorites:”

Fighting Facebook Over Page Ownership

The Facebook page of one of the state’s most vibrant live-work-play destinations for shopping, dining and more, one with 63,000 fans, had been controlled by a former board member of the group’s business association. That individual no longer ran a business in the group, but began allowing competing advertising and other promotional posts on the Facebook page from competing districts.

Now, it would seem that regaining control of a Facebook page that has been hijacked should be a relatively routine affair, but it took correctly identifying an opening and legal documentation of what we at first presumed to be of the no-brainer variety in terms of giving Facebook the bullet-proof info they needed to make a logical business decision, not to mention three solid months of submitting abuse reports.

Yelping it Up – Sticking to Terms of Service

The terms and conditions accepted by users when posting reviews on Yelp expressly forbid creating any content that is “false, intentionally misleading, or defamatory,” but there’s no accounting for honesty and ethics these days.

We once went to bat for a home services client that was in a jam because one of their techs accidentally injured, in self-defense, a dog that had attacked him in a customer’s home. The owner didn’t see it that way. In a perception-is-reality world, especially one involving America’s love affair with pets, the brand damage had been done. A local station did an investigative report on the incident, one that was generally fair in allowing our client to tell their (very sensible) side of the story.

But that’s not even the main focus of this cautionary tale. The larger problem became a Yelp review where a commenter used the television coverage to state that they would never use their services.

It took months of wrangling with Yelp before we could get that review taken down. Our argument was simple. Yelp is for reviews and, theoretically, at least, one cannot review a business which they have never used. It reminded us of the story we once encountered where a restaurant went to bat against Yelp on a very negative review posted … before the business had even opened.

By posting as they did in our client’s case, it was a de facto violation of Yelp’s terms against false, intentionally misleading, or defamatory content. The poster had no special information or insight as to the veracity of the story and his review was therefore rendered moot … besides the obvious fact that they weren’t writing a review at all.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

This one is perhaps my personal favorite. I used Google Maps to figure out where I was going on a first appointment with a household-name home service company, but my eye was immediately drawn to the first review that popped up.

It began, and I’ll never forget this for as long as I live, describing the arrival of a service person with the words “His eyes were red and he smelled of alcohol as he lurched through the door.”

Sounds like the first line of a pulp novel, doesn’t it?

Most of the examples above center on themes of shenanigans and maleficence, but this one is just … well, really, really bad for a brand. The client, unaware of the digital blotch on their good name, thanked me profusely for bringing the situation to his attention, and we left it at that.

Flash forward two weeks when the client called me back begging for counsel on how to dig themselves out of that hole. We had no way of knowing if the review was fair and accurate. Heck. I’ve had workers in my home that I suspected of more than just imbibing in a quick nip of booze in their truck, so the truthfulness of the post was not in play here.

We had no legitimate claim to request that the comments were taken down, so we did the next best thing — we buried it beneath more positive reviews. The company dramatically amped up their solicitations of reviews, a good strategy for any business. The customer was leery of the strategy. What if we get yet more bad reviews?

But he wasn’t giving his business enough credit. Strong business managers have an almost visceral understanding of how their company is perceived. It took months to build up enough comments to blot out the prominence of one negative review.

And my client was pleasantly surprised, but he really should not have been, when the company to which he was so dedicated, received overwhelmingly (you guessed it) positive reviews.

What are your worst marketing stories? We don’t work magic, but we’re pretty darned good as problem-solvers in the sometime rough and tumble world of the web. So give me a call and let’s talk.

I promise I won’t laugh.