In the world of media and public relations there is a term of art called “The Streisand Effect.” The term was coined by Mike Masnick of www.techdirt.com and is defined by Wikipedia as “a situation where an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information results in the unintended consequence of the effort instead increasing public awareness of the information.”
For instance, if you have a steam cleaning company that has great reviews online and has been around for almost 30 years, but more recently your VP of Marketing has been creating very, very bad press for your business in a place that’s over 400 miles away from your customers, don’t do anything that will bring a lot more attention to the situation. If someone publishes something very damning about your business and then just leaves it alone and doesn’t do anything to really get the news out to a wide audience, just let it go. Don’t amplify their voice by bringing more attention to it by making dumb ass threats that have absolutely no basis in the law.
Wikipedia mentions the Chinese proverb “(when one) attempts to cover (the truth), (it) becomes more conspicuous” (欲蓋彌彰, pinyin: Yù gài mí zhāng).” As readers here may remember, This Reporter already did another story related to this subject called STOP SLAPPing ME. In that article I explain Texas’s anti SLAPP law that protects publishers from lawsuits by people that are only trying to silence someone for speaking the truth. It is very difficult to get published content removed because of this law.
In yet another article that is related to this subject, This Reporter discussed how to protect your brand online. One of the most important things business owners can do to protect their brand online is to be sure to register all 3 of the most popular top level domains com/org/net. There is no restriction on others to register a domain name, even if someone owns one of the other similar domains. For instance, if you have a steam cleaning company and you operate a website at the dot com address, it is critical to register the dot org and dot net addresses as well. The reason for this is that, for instance, if you run into a problem with people not liking how you do business and registering one or both of the other domains so they can create a website to publicize why they don’t like how you do business. All digital marketing professionals know this. At least they should.
Another important way to protect your brand is to protect your own identity online. This means registering domains with your first and last name at each of the 3 main top level domains. This is absolutely critical because while it might be possible to change your business name to try and get out of any trouble you have created for your brand, changing your own name is a bit more difficult.
