NEGATIVE ONLINE MARKETING

Negative Online Marketing

A new and disturbing trend in the world of the internet is negative online marketing. What is negative online marketing? To be honest I’m not really sure if negative online marketing is an actual term however that is the term I use to describe individuals using various online marketing tactics to slander their competition as opposed to promoting themselves.

Where did negative online marketing start? I doubt anyone can say for sure, however I became aware of it during the 2008 Democratic Primary elections. Maybe all the negative ad campaigns being run by the candidates can be attributed to inspiring the very first negative online marketer. The first negative online marketing campaign I ever saw was not even on the internet. It was in fact on television. A local mattress company aired a television advertisement that resembled your typical television ad until the very end where the person in the commercial said “Google search our competition and find out why we are better”. The first 50 or so times I saw that commercial I never really put two and two together. Then on a day when nothing better was going on I decided to do a quick Google search on their competitors. The search results brought back numerous blogs, forums, and other online social websites with negative comments about their competition.

The bedding store is not the only example of negative online marketing. Just recently I received a phone call from a friend that owns a nail salon. She wanted to know how she could remove negative comments from Yahoo’s local search. If you have ever looked at Yahoo’s local search, you will see that there is an option to view or write a review about a business. Sure enough there were negative reviews.

Could the reviews or negative comments be legitimate? I’m sure they can be but legitimate or not, I have noticed a trend of negative comments or bashing online. This trend which I refer to as negative online marketing is quite interesting and brings up a few questions. How do you go about negative online marketing? Is negative online marketing effective? If so, why is negative online marketing effective?

There are quite a few ways in which people go about negative online marketing. The first and most common method is blogging. Negative online marketers would go into those blogs and create the illusion that they have worked with the business and had a negative experience. Review websites are also very popular with negative online marketers. Reviews can be submitted by visitors on websites like: yahoo local, Google Shopping and many other online shopping sites. As in the nail salon example above, people who want to hurt their competitor’s business can post negative comments on review sites. Negative online marketing can also be done by creating simple websites or by emailing marketing and discussing negative aspects about a business’s competition. There are many other ways to perform negative online marketing those are just the most common methods.

Is negative online marketing effective? Most of the time negative online marketing is effective. One of the reasons why it is so effective is because it is usually hard to remove those negative comments allowing them to live on for a long time on the internet. Some websites allow users to report spamming, but because it can be hard to distinguish spammers from marketers comments are rarely removed. Many people shopping or looking for information about companies online will be easily persuaded into not using a company if it is discussed negatively. If a company performs negative online marketing about their competition and has positive marketing about them, they are likely to get the business over their competitors.

Negative Online Marketing is also much easier for marketers to perform than positive marketing. For example, it is harder to post positive comments in a blog and not get removed as spam than it is to post negative comments which look like you are warning potential customers. Because negative online marketing is so easy it is becoming more popular.

Negative Online Marketing, marketing which slanders competition, is a new and growing trend in the Internet world. Although WebDuck Designs does not promote Negative Online Marketing, it is a very effective method of increasing business.