Questnet

Search engines can be both a boon and bane. While they allow people to find your services and help boost sales, conversely, they can also help them discover your “dark side” and cause the reverse. Your future employer becomes prejudiced after finding an article on a past white collar case against you. Sales of your bread products tanked because a blogger claimed they cause cancer and that article ranks #1 in the search results.

It doesn’t matter whether the negative information is true or false because some people will believe everything they read so damage WILL be done anyway. Legal action usually won’t work because of the enormity and anonymity of the Internet. What’s more if the perpetrator lives in a country that blindly protects free speech online.

That was the basis for Online Reputation Management, which almost always meant demoting negative results using SEO. I spoke with John Kerr of Edelman once regarding offering this service but he felt it as being unethical. Personally, I feel that it’s not our job to judge a client but rather to help them communicate their message.

There was one problem though - what if you were a big company like say Dell? The complaints are never-ending if you’re serving that many customers and it’ll be near impossible and expensive to continue creating spam to counter the negative results.

One such MLM company called QuestNet was faced with such a situation. And their method was, I feel, ingenius.

It’s not hard to imagine that some MLMers will go all out to recruit their downline, including misleading them if need be. I remember a Lampe Berger agent tried to entice me by showing off his Beemer when I was young, but that’s another story.

Anyway, it’s not easy taking care of 2.5 million members in 160 countries and making sure that they always play by the rules. Someone, somewhere is going to sell QuestNet as “your guaranteed route to riches” or “a program that makes money by itself”. Once the disillusioned downline realizes that it isn’t as easy as he was told, he blames QuestNet and calls it a scam! And you can find many such blog posts if you searched for “questnet scam” on google.

So what the company did was create and optimized QuestNet Scam, such that potential members who are researching the rumours they had heard will find this website in the search results, i.e. acting like a honeytrap.

The next clever part is that the content is specially designed to address the concerns of this target audience by engaging them in a Q&A on common misconceptions, instead of trying to hard-sell QuestNet.

The recent bad press in India, where several staff were rounded up by the local police, was also openly discussed in a separate section called QuestNet India. This helps create a perception that QuestNet has nothing to hide because it has done nothing wrong.

Finally, QuestNet Reviews helps reinforce the idea that the QuestNet program and products are legitimate by publishing the testimonials from members who have actually tried them, i.e. while the negative claims remain just rumors, the positives are substantiated by real people.

So if you have an online PR situation, why not try to communicate the truth (i.e. “your side of the story”) through one strong website, instead of trying to displace the negative results with hundreds of useless spam sites?!