If you haven’t heard already, the folks over at ReviewMe have landed in some hot water for allowing bogus blog listings to appear on their list of blogs willing to do paid posting (or pay-per-post). Both BoingBoing and Gawker’s Lifehacker were listed as willing to accept paid reviews for $500.
When the advertiser went to contact Lifehacker to set up samples for review, etc., Lifehacker had no idea what was going on. Their sister blog, Consumerist, also noticed BoingBoing was on the list and contacted Cory Doctorow and co. Long story short, BoingBoing and Lifehacker/Gawker were very unhappy at their names being used to promote ReviewMe and let that be known in a post where ReviewMe is equated with scumbag.
Patrick Gavin, who runs ReviewMe, contacted both of the offended parties and offered up an explanation for the loophole that allowed the bogus listings to exist and pledged to get it fixed. All is well right?
That would be the case except that nowhere on ReviewMe’s blog is there any mention of the row. Now, a big blog like BoingBoing or Consumerist could do a lot of damage to any blog’s reputation. I’m surprised that Patrick didn’t see to it an explanatory posting was made on ReviewMe’s official blog.
Ok, that’s not good. If I’d gotten negative press coverage like that, I would have made sure to post a big explanation on my blog as to my side of the story. Then, I would create a dedicated category specifically to detail what I’m going to do to make sure something bad like that never happens again. That works much better than vague statements as to “fixing the problem”.
I’ve lost trust, now is the time to regain it and be totally transparent about the process to fixing the problems that caused that loss of trust. Way back in the 1980s, the makers of Tylenol had a scare when a few bottles of their medicine were tampered with. A few people died and it looked like an isolated incident but they couldn’t be sure. So, Tylenol spent tons of money on advertising, committed to fixing the problem by dumping all Tylenol products on store shelves and promised to implement better security features to prevent tampering.
Because they were so open with the process, Tylenol won back their consumers’ trust and the whole incident turned out to be a big positive reflection on the company. Lesson here: Deal with bad publicity head on and be as open as possible, starting with a big post on your official blog.
{ 6 comments }
The review was ordered for Lifehacker, not Consumerist (although two sites are related).
Very good advice, if you don’t deal with something someone else will and chances you will deal with it much more favourably than anyone else.
Still at least Gavin contacted the blogs and allowed them to post up their instant messaging chats I suppose
I agree with you totally, Philip. Only leaving a comment in the Consumerist seems rather inadequate, especially after you’ve been lambasted by both blogs.
I’m also a little surprised that not many bloggers (especially the blogosphere gossip/news blogs) have actually written about this issue.
Tony, thanks for the note. I made the change!
Collis, Maki, compounding the problem, have you guys seen ReviewMe’s blog? What a mess of spammy comments! They need to clean that crap up! Also, it’s totally out of date–I mean, Andy Hagans is on the bio but where is Patrick?
Maki, I agree with you that more news blogs should have picked on this one. I also think that the overall effect might have been positive for reviewme, it got mentioned on a lot of popular blogs (including boing boing) ,and people tend to forget that stuff pretty soon
Philip,
Yeah their blog is an entire mess. Almost more than half of all their blog comments consist of spam.
Surprising that they can’t even task one person to moderate or clean up the mess. It’s not as if they get a lot of real comments everyday.
Maybe you should pitch them for a job as a blogger!
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