Bad bloggin'

I recently found a statistic that says 70% of bloggers are organically talking about brands on their blogs. Straight off the bat I immediately wanted to know how much of that brand chat is positive or negative – it might be a glass half empty kind of view but I’m guessing a lot of that isn’t great advertising.

Looking for an apartment in Minneapolis recently, myself and my wife checked each rental firm’s customer reviews and searched them on Google to find any hate blogs that detail exactly how many mice they had in their kitchen or told us about the time the landlord kicked their puppy down the stairs. There were a few for each firm, people ranting about how they got stiffed for $200 or how the hall smelled of cheese, all the time. This didn’t enamor us to the properties but we went anyway and we met some firm’s reps and they were mostly quite lovely and their properties quite lovely also.

So were these bloggers lying? Probably not entirely. If you are pissed, you want to shout and the Internet is a great way of getting your voice heard but because there is no one to shout otherwise you can elaborate – the mice were massive, the cheese smell overpowering, the evil landlord was definitely a child catcher (just look at his moustache, dude).

Also, some of these apartments had maybe 100 renters, of which maybe five blogged. Simply, getting people to blog about how great a brand is or how wonderful a service is isn’t easy. Not one of the apartment blogs waxed lyrical about the quality of the AC or detailed how attractive the friendly janitor is, especially when he takes his shirt off to fix the young ladies’ extractor fans. You expect good service and hot janitors, you don’t feel compelled to write about it.

BUT this might not be all bad. A recent NYT article found that a particularly vile person was using complaints and hate blogs to up his Google ratings and get more custom. In the article, Google wouldn’t confirm whether it based its analytics on sentiment. It obviously doesn’t if Mr ‘I know where you live’ got into the top three searches.

So if Google doesn’t care if it’s bad news or good news, is bad blogging a good way of getting a message out there?

Maybe not forever. Threatening people down the phone can only bump you up Google for so long before the Feds come-a-knockin’ and there are enough people out there who can, you know, read and will notice a health food brand has made its way up to the front page because hundreds of cute kittens have been murdered by the firm, not because it makes a delicious cat-flavored health shake.

The key is to reply and get engaged. One of the landlords I asked admitted his firm would look better if it actively replied to bad blogs, maybe citing little things like 'the truth' and denied the scurrilous rumors about his facial hair. The lady in the NYT article would not have dreamed of buying from the evil online vendor if she had read any of the hate blogs posted and I doubt I'd be sipping on a health shake I'd found online if I'd taken the time to read about the kitty genocide.