Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
No pain, no gain.
To win without risk is to triumph without glory.
You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.
Bang! You’re dead.
Risk-taking is cherished American pastime. We admire the entrepreneurs and test pilots who push the envelope for great gain. I think one of the reasons our country has been as successful and economically prosperous as it has is that we don’t stigmatize failure.
But there are degrees of failure. There’s a big difference between living to play another day and paying with your life. I am seeing a disturbing number of clients and potential clients playing Russian roulette with their Internet marketing.
Here are three high-risk behaviors with matching cautionary tales to help you weigh the risks against rewards for any of these.
Pay to Play
The technology blog TechCrunch has never been shy about publicly embarrassing folks who offend them. A recent article blasted PR firm name PRServe for overtly offering a service to startup companies that would get them a post on an “A-level blog” like TechCrunch for the bargain price of $750. They found this sort of a la carte pricing to be objectionable on two levels. First, they feel that is crosses an editorial/ethical line that makes them uncomfortable. Second, they care about the startup community and don’t want to see them focusing on parlor tricks and black hat practices to be successful. In their words, “you shouldn’t be paying for TC articles, or any press coverage for that matter, you should be paying for the help with your message and communications, which, if you have a good and/or compelling product, might result in more coverage.”
So what did TechCrunch do about it? They called out the company for this behavior but they didn’t stop there:
Because of these principles, we will be banning PRServe or anyone who we catch doing this from pitching us moving forward. As of today, we’ve told our writers to ignore all pitches from this firm (and its director Chris Barrett), and advise his clients to reach out to them directly if they indeed have a worthwhile story. And, if you spent $750 to get your startup on TechCrunch, you should ask PRServe for a refund. If they don’t give it to you, I will personally give it to you, out of my own pockets, not Aol’s.
Social Media #FAILS
There is a high level of Schadenfreude when we see companies make questionable decisions on social media. We either get outraged or have a good laugh over it but the damage can be substantial. Influence in social media cannot be bought with money: It is paid for with social capital. Building a solid online reputation takes months or years to build and one Tweet to destroy.
In July of this year, online boutique Celeb Boutique sent out the following Tweet shortly after the horrendous mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado:
To this day, when you Google them, most of the top results are negative articles about this gaff. Kenneth Cole made a similar mistake in 2011, sending out a questionable Tweet attempting to newsjack the Egyptian riots:
Ironically, Hubspot wrote a blog post about 8 of the Biggest Marketing Faux Pas of All Time in which they cited the Kenneth Cole incident, saying “The lesson social media marketers can learn from this awful mistake is that humor doesn’t work if you’re newsjacking something contentious.” And then they got caught in their own contentious newsjacking when they published a blog article titled 5 Hurricane Sandy Newsjacks from Marketers. While people in New Jersey were still suffering and even dying from the effects of the hurricane, Hubspot outraged many people by seemingly praising companies for their newsjacking efforts. They ended up modifying the post, apologizing and making a $5,000 donation to the American Red Cross.
Search Engine Death Penalty
This last issue is of greatest concern to me. I’ve talked with two different prospective clients in the past few months who were paying a SEO consulting company (one in the U.S. and the other from India) to get them ranking for particular keywords. After doing some investigating I found that these consultants were employing black hat techniques that violate Google’s quality guidelines. The good news is that they were working. Both of these companies were ranking #1 for some highly competitive keywords. The bad news is that if Google catches them (and they probably will at some point), the result could be the death penalty.
In April, 2011 Overstock.com was penalized by Google because they were offering discounts to students and faculty in exchange for links on coveted .edu sites. The toll of the Google penalty on Overstock.com: a 5 percent drop in sales and 32 percent loss of organic traffic. A month later, JCPenny experienced a similar fate because their SEO firm was purchasing thousands of low quality links in an effort to rank higher for very general and competitive terms.
These companies lost millions as a result, but what would happen to your company if it completely disappeared from Google for a year? Most organizations don’t have the resources to recover as quickly as these did. If this happened to one of the prospective clients I mentioned, they would both be out of business forever.
Bang – you’re dead. So please be careful out there.
