I get so sick of hearing people talk about bad press and how it effects their brand. Here is the thing:
THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS BAD PRESS WHEN YOU HAVE A QUALITY PRODUCT. Anyone who says otherwise just does not have experience in online marketing. I will tell you right now every time I stumble across a “sucks website” for a site or product I have or am affiliated with then lookup the statistics I will always find the conversion goals for that site to be higher then pay per click and general type-in traffic.
The best thing when people write about how much you or your product sucks is they are doing it for free…. freeeeeeeeee publicity baby! These people will spend all day researching… taking what you say out of context… your products out of context.. just to get their 5 minutes of fame (they pray). They will even do all the social parts of it like submit their shoemoneysucks posts to digg. I know it sounds amazing but its true. Instead of actually doing something themselves they will spend all their time trying to shoot down what you have worked hard to build.
Lets look at some examples.
Blogrush – If you look at the comments on blogrush about 60% of them on this site were anti-blogrush and of those anti-blogrush posts most of them made there own site. Just testing my theory I recently talked to John Reese the founder of blogrush and he confirmed what I thought. Many NEW visitors who had never heard of blogrush before now were being driven to his site by these blogrushsucks sites. AND when these new visitors went to his site they made a choice for them self that it was worth trying and implemented it.
I would love to post you the conversion of new AuctionAds users from such sites but I cant =(
Let me show you a real life example:
Huber Hummer – A local Omaha Hummer dealer (where Dillsmack and I got our h2′s) had a bunch of their computers siezed by federal authorities in November of 2006. It was huge news in every major midwest news paper
The dealership never even knew what hit them… the media showed up even before any authorities…. It was a total publicity stunt by some politicians… They were later cleared of all charges and newspapers retracted there stories…
So wow that sucks to be them huh? NOT REALLY. They reported a 44% increase in sales in 2007 despite major issues with traffic due to a new highway being put right in front of them. Because they have such an incredible name… ADD moment – Before I even moved to Nebraska one time I was coming back from Arizona with my father and his brand new suburban broke down near Omaha. Huber Chevrolet totally took care of us MUCH MORE than the dealership we purchased the vehicle from.
Ok back on track – Their quality of service is legendary and when this happened it just reminded people of their brand and led to sales (even if the story was horrific).
Yes thats right. It may be hard on your ego to see a yoursitesucks.com but it will, without a doubt, drive people to your site and when it does, believe it or not, people will think for themselves and decide to buy/try your product.
About the author...
Jeremy Schoemaker – who has written 2415 posts on ShoeMoney.com.
Hi I am Jeremy Schoemaker and ShoeMoney.com is my blog. 99% of the post here are done by me but you will see others occasionally make guest posts. This blog is fun to write but for my day job I run several online companies.
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{ 95 comments… read them below or add one }
Wasn’t that how people felt about your comments on Ultra DNS?
So … I guess I should be shooting for a mysitesucks review to increase traffic.
negative publicity ( its still publicity ), thats who celebrity get in the limelight most of the time as well. By the way Jeremy, how about visit my site and write a post how bad my site sucks
True there is no such thing as bad publicity but it’s those who are getting the publicity that benefit but the people who are creating it can be putting their reputations on the line. I recently made a post on my blog about pointless blog posts that people write and one of them was constantly bashing other people’s products such as BlogRush. It only serves to help BlogRush but if you are the one doing all the bashing, people may not take notice of your opinion much in the future.
somebody just missed a big opportunity. I wonder how many people as me checked out yoursitesucks.com… too bad the site is empty.
yup great point. Totally amplifies what I am saying. You are bringing them up again which means that stuck in your head. So in the end did my post hurt them or help them? Well it certainly sent traffic to them no doubt. I think they have a shitty product.. But I think shoemoney.com readers are smart enough to decide for themself if they like the product or not.
Great point. But kind of makes me wonder – are people going to jump on this and create their own _sucks domains to drive traffic to their real site?
Another great point
There is no such thing as bad publicity, there is only publicity!
well it looks like your site is one of 900000 other making money online sites so as shoe said above quality site is key.
I think you should pray nobody writes a sucks site about your site.
Jeremy, you might want to investigate this thread:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/10/11/being-stupid-and-litigious-is-no-way-to-go-through-life/
and see whether the photographer in question will benefit from the enormous amount of bad press he’s receiving.
ya… my point wasnt really “what does shoemoney think” but more that when you get press… good or bad… its your stage to shine.
I read somewhere that some bad press or reviews for a product are actually good for a site because only all-glowing reviews look suspicious and injected, whereas a few negative ones make the company seem legit.
Another great post dude.
UltraDNS just called me about their service and I passed, I did forget (until this post) that they were hounding you about it…
hahahah called OUT
This is def true, if they click thru via a xyzsucks.com site, it’s because they’re interested to find out more about it and form their own opinion. If thye alreayd had an opinion, they wouldn’t have click thru.
True which is why when writing a negative post you should do your research and only post facts. Instead of saying Blogrush sucks say Blogrush doesn’t currently work as well as it could and then explain in detail its shortcomings/causes for those shortcomings and what BR is doing to fix them.
If you do that with all your posts you wont blow your entire rep on one post.
I couldn’t agree more. The Fanboy segment has really taken the bite out of bad reviews, now when someone scathes about a Microsoft product, I just assume they are an Apple Fanboy (Admission: I use a MacBook Pro), I rarely take them seriously anymore. It just leads me to do more research and find out more about the product than I might have otherwise.
Do you think Matel is going to sell more toys this holiday because of the lead paint stories?
In some cases bad press is just plain bad press. For example, some idiot (who’s name escapes me at the moment) tried to sell (against any reseller agreement) some e-marketing package online for $7 or something after DealDotCom was offering it for around $10 and then he made a big stink about how DDC was a rip-off because he “found” the package at a cheaper price. When John Chow outed him as a scammer, he instantly became known in the blogosphere as a scam artist and someone you shouldn’t trust with your money. I can see how the original scam may have produced some profit, but the bad publicity surely did him no good.
I agree with Shoe. If you truly believe whatever you’ve created is fantastic, what critics say shouldn’t bother you. And if it truly is fantastic and there isn’t a downside or exploitation plan to it then it will get it’s credit when it’s all said and done.
Just look at The Office from Ricky Gervais. When that first came out, people hated it and it had some of the lowest ratings in British TV history. But Gervais insisted it continued and now it’s quoted as comic genius and has been replicated in multiple countries, most notibly the US one which is also very successful despit sloppy bad starts.
It’s because Gervais did something new, new and unheard of and it was different. So people didn’t really know what to think, they were so used to braod, childish comedies and catchphrases they were taken-a-back. But when the people who really knew comedy saw it… they knew it was brilliant.
I would argue that the press gotten for Tylenol in the early 80s when someone was poisoning people was not good. Now they managed the situation well and made the most of it, but it could have killed them.
I disagree. I am older and remember when that happened. We still had Tylenol in the house =P
On one side, I think there is something to be said for who is dishing out the bad publicity. If the New York Times is reporting something that sheds light negatively on a company, that would have a much more serious impact on that company compared to JoeNoName saying the same thing – or even worse – on his blog. Same with this industry, if Danny says something it carries much more weight than if NoNameSEOBlogger blogged it.
But there are definite cases where being bad and getting that initial bad publicity can all work out in the end, if you handle it well… remember Hugh Grant, everyone thought that was going to be career ending. Same with Rob Lowe. And if you have to look up what they both did bad, that just proves my point
Well put, there a lot of celebrities who are only celebrities due to their bad press. They still earn a truck load of cash though.
Interesting. I think overall I agree with your opinion though I have no personal experiences with having people making sites about mine yet.
Soon I hope!
Hahaha Britney Spears anyone?
Shoe, I’m prepared to pay 1 dollar for every correct use of “they’re”, “their”, and “there” in your posts up to 100 dollars to your favorite charity over the next two weeks starting Monday Oct 15th and ending Oct 29th. Here’s the catch, 2 dollars will be subtracted for every incorrect use. It’s a win-win. We fix some signature grammar errors and a worthy charity benefits. Agreed?
Yeah have actually had an article I wrote in my magazine’s online version a few months back about an artists cd being terrible and all of the fans of the artist were posting it everywhere on message boards and hating on our magazine. Lets just say over the next week we got about 20k more unique visitors then usual and of course profits went up and actually out of those people coming through those links had about a fourth of those people be return visitors
We have worked for 2 clients till date for so called reputation management, kicking out the bad reviews out of the top 10 positions in google for their company name.
if anyone recalls the old Coke vs pesi commericals…this would be a similar example. pepsi was small and coke was huge..when it started. then pepsi started the whole campagin in a few cities to test it out. Coke then saw it was actauly driving sales for them…and decided to run a national wide campaign…to rebuttal the whole thing. whats funny is they made pepsi know nation wide with that campagin and to this day everyone remembers it….after that pespi went on to surpass coke in sales in US and its help make it what it is today!
Shoe,
Given the bad publicity surrounding the bidding direcotries recently. Whats you take on that. I just release a bidding directory and forum as this was all happening.
In my naivety I though bidding directories were a good thing as they gave the owner of the link to pay more for better exposure and so the bidding directories were/are also a like of marketing tool of sorts.
What’s say you
44%? Nice! I don’t agree BlogRush has a good product, but I do agree that press is press, and beneficial.
This I so agree with for instance look at pay pal sucks.com
Tons of people over there saying paypal is a bunch of scammers, yet the other 90% of people use them…..
Given the bad press surrounding the bidding directories and google recently what your take on their future?
I recently launched a bidding directory and in my niaveity felt that they were a good service as they gave the opportunity to buyer to pay for exposure not just link love.
But the bad press has made me stop marketing and even think about closing down the site!
Do you think that I should still go ahead with the site?
Yup, Same with customer comments, or so I’ve heard.. make sure to get some in there that are just a bit negative..
Very true ….. the negative traffic might drive them there but the user then makes their independant mind up not follow that of the tool that has written the article.
But AuctionAds does suck now lol :/
Sure, I can see how “bad press” might send traffic but those “users” that matter that can really boost a service or product are the first to walk away. What good does having 10,000 noobs checking out and signing up for a service if many of the top publishers who have solid traffic balk? On top of that, many of those noobs take the “guru’s” advice and stay away.
Like the mentioned crappy DNS company mentioned before…even if I go to their site to check it out, I wouldn’t use their service because of a trusted review.
I pulled auctionads and know quite a lot of other heavy publishers who did as well because of the questionable drops toward the end before the sale and what seemed worse after the sell. I didn’t pull it off my sites because of good review or bad review I pulled it because it was sucking all of a sudden. Other noobs jumping over to check it out after reading this post won’t help them much but others that have large networks might reconsider.
(disclaimer: based on my experience of massive drops in clicks/revenue out of the blue as well as many of my friends. Maybe some people are making a ton but when you see sudden drops without any real reason it makes you wonder who is ripping you off lol)
Good press, bad press. Any publicity is good
at least they know your company exists.
Hey when do we get to ask questions again?
Word of mouth good or bad brings attention to a company. There’s no denying it! Come on…somebody talk bad about me then…no just kidding!
But I think if someone opinion you trust says don’t use it, I wouldn’t use it. I can remember the incident with MyBlogLogs. After hearing about the tracking problem here, I removed it from my blog. If the criticism is right on, it can hurt a product.
Damn, I was about to write some negative stuff about a company’s really bad website and service but if it just gives them more traffic then I guess I won’t bother. I think you have a point about the quality of service, so if they get bad press but have good service then that is good, but bad press and bad service to me says a company is on the way out.
Thats right Tracey,
You would just give them more traffic
This IS a great post. I completely agree. A bad rep will only really bring you more traffic unless you ARE the SPAM company that’s supposed to SPAM…
Yup, that’s called BUZZ… BUZZ Marketing…
umm… i think that’s too complicated, why don’t you give him all your money instead? :p
I agree. The bottom line is that Blogrush gets a lot more traffic from your blog than it give out. The more it goes in and less it comes out. forget that sh*t…
If there is one thing I have leaned in my brief career online its that if people are talking about good or bad, then thats good for you. I had a huge spike in traffic yesterday about 1 PM. Where it cane from was someone posted about my 100.00 contest. Hype sells , bad press sells better sometimes
It’s interesting to read about “internet marketiers”and how much traffic they get and how much money they get. Personnally we ain’t bothered about who visits us- there ain’t any “click ons” just out and out information for free for our punters.
The people that contact us are our clients not referals from us to buy others “crap”.
You guys should try working for a living.
Have a good one. By the way thanks for not having the “999,999 visitor congatulations I’ve won header” as soonas I see that shit i spam the site. Take care my friend and good luck. The Baldchemist. At the end of the day its you that sells not the “press”
Very good point. Shoe, please write a post where you trash my site
very true! good or bad, publicity is always helpful. So when are you going to trash my site in your blog! LOL
Negative press is good, if there’s some quality to the service or website.
Bad press for a bad service could kill a company,
Yeah, surely for every story where bad publicity made somebody a profit there are 10 where it’s caused somebody to go out of business?
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The same goes for Pop Rocks. When they first came out the rumor of soda and pop rocks would make your stomach explode started and sales plummeted. It took them years to get beyond that problem.
What about when Red M&M’s caused cancer so Mars went as far as to pulling the color?
Negative press I think is as good if not better at times depending on the goals of your site.
For instance I post some everyday info about ringtones and I get a pretty decent response rate, But when I post about totally negative things in the mobile space my responses go through the roof.. look out servers on fire..lol
Yes, its true. The key is that your own sites reflect quality, then the bad press drives people to you for free and you can convert them by proving the nay-sayers wrong. People are usually smart enough to discover what is really going on. The only way to be noticed is to POLARIZE people. They either love your or hate you. Anything in between equals being average and overlooked.
any press is good press as long as that press doesn’t shut down your business. more press in many cases good or bad intrigues interest which can usually increase foot traffic… which usually increases sales.
the winz is if you create a site about your site, that says your site sucks (just make sure to register the site private)…
Quality Product can become bad press when it is not properly composed
this is definitely true – it’s all about the attention as such.
Rebecca – this is so true. I had a really bad review of a product on one of my sites, but it sold well. But, the person who created the product didn’t and asked me to make the review a bit kinder. As soon as I did sales dropped off.
A review that gives the bad points too sounds more honest.
We totally refuse to continue working for bad customers – we just sack them. And we had this woman who was a real pain in the ass recently, so I told her to find someone else to complete her work. Well, she said that she knew everyone in her town, and she’d tell them how bad we are.
This does not bother me. The way I see it – the real nuisance type customers who are always whinging usually have equally painful friends, so they are doing us a favour by not recommending us to them. And the people you would want as customers are not likely to take notice of the pain in the ass types anyway.
Yes all press is good press I agree 100%
The other thing is if you do have a couple of skeletons in your cupboard
Happens to many companies
The key here is having a good product – if your product is a joke bad press isn’t going to help you in any way
THats what happened when John Chow got banned. Lol They made him more famous
Yea in this kind of context, there is definitely no such thing as bad publicity!
I dont’ think its bad press that hurst, it’s mismanaging the bad press. You are right that if you have a quality product you can rise above it if you handle it correctly.
Amen to this – bad press will draw traffic/interest to your business, and if you can prove it wrong, you’re in great shape. If all you do is confirm what was published, it’s bad news.
Bad press is still bad press, but all publicity is good publicity*
=p
This post hits it home for me. Definitely! Any press period is good. Can’t complain for free advertisements!
Thanks your comment is stunning.
I will definitely read your blog..
thank you again
No such thing as bad press – you’re absolutely right. People will even go out of their way to google you up if you’re featured elsewhere. Bad or no.
any press is good press
The only company i can think of who really suffered from bad press was Ratner’s jewellers a few years ago. The owner announced to the world that he just sold crap. It was in all the newspapers – their sales plummeted and they ended up closing down.
A lot of jewellery is bought as gifts. Many people buying it probably knew they were buying cheap crap, but they probably wouldn’t want the person receiving the gift to know it was crap.
On the other hand – even Titanic didn’t ruin the White Star Line business.
I think I would rather have bad jewellery than risk drowning!
Haha thats what i was going to say, any press it good press and it had worked in years. Publicity stunts etc. Always works.
Somehow people are more attracted to controversial sites or sites that gives bad reviews. We tend to search for bad reviews of stuff online to learn. and of cause, we tend to complain more than we compliment. so… 0.5% bad reviews can generate lots of discussion than 99.5%.
hmm. good point. Will keep that in mind next time i try something out.
Yeah, people wanna see what all the fuss is about.
You’re right, any press is good press!
The earnings look a bit small to me
That’s what I think too… any press is good press!
The best movie ever! I didn’t know anything up until today about it, when I went to see it. It hit home for me
i think you are correct but you have only one mistake for me… and you know that
Thank you for informing
thank you yeah
That’s what I think too… any press is good press!
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