The intro to my blog says I’ll share information about marketing successes and failures. So far my blog has mainly focused on sharing helpful information and insight. This entry is a bit different, because it reveals a major marketing mistake I recently made.

Fortunately, this marketing error affected only my company, and not a client’s. It’s not easy to share my ignorance here. After all, I’m supposed to be the “expert.” The purpose of my blog is to help small businesses though, so I think it’s important to share not only what I’ve learned during my 20 years in marketing, but also the tough lessons I continue to learn today.

At one time, in addition to this blog, I maintained another one. Because I stay busy with my “day job” as a marketing consultant, I didn’t have time to maintain both blogs. So I deleted the other blog, hosted elsewhere. It seemed like a simple thing to do. I knew it might take some time for the blog to disappear from the search engines, but I never anticipated what actually happened.

Several weeks ago, I noticed my company website had new incoming links from my supposedly defunct blog. If not for this one fact, I might have never gone back to look at a blog I thought no longer existed. You can imagine my shock when I found what appeared to be my old blog, complete with my logo, old entries and links to my websites. It was quite live and now had pornographic photos, links and video added throughout. It appeared to be mine and affiliated with my company, even though it was not. The first lesson I learned was to never just delete a blog.

After some research, I found that what happened to me is not all that uncommon. My old site was now a “splog,” a spam blog. It appears that through some automated process the sploggers watch for URL’s that are vacated. They re-register the URL under their own account, reload a copy of the previous site and begin adding their own spam. Unfortunately, in this case, the spam was pornography sitting right next to my Mustard Seed Marketing logo.

Having worked in public relations for many years, I believe a company should protect its reputation at all costs. Over the next three days, I was totally distressed as I repeatedly emailed the blog host trying to get the site taken down. Through a "whois" site, I also located the name and email for the owner of the porn site being advertised. I emailed him as well. After much persistence, and much embarrassment on my part, the site was taken down.

This entire situation gave me much greater respect for the damage that can be done to a company’s reputation because of digital defamation. The Internet is a wonderful marketing tool, providing many opportunities to reach customers quickly and easily. But it comes with risks, and that “www” could easily stand for the wild, wild west. Yes, there are limited protections, such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for a company. It is not lawful for someone to simply steal your web content, logo or business name and impersonate you on his own fake blog or website. With some persistence, and possibly even legal help, you can get the offending site taken down. But, in order to do that, you have to be aware that your company information has been stolen. That’s why it’s important NOT to be a sitting duck. You must be proactive.

Had I not noticed the link to my company site, I might never have known about the offending blog. Potential clients might have searched, found it, and concluded that I had a porn site on the side. I had no safeguards in place to alert me to my company name, logo or information being used without my knowledge. Now I do. They’re just a few simple steps I advise all business owners to take.

• Set up regular Google and Yahoo Alerts. With these tools, I now receive a daily email update of Google and Yahoo search results on the topic “Mustard Seed Marketing.” A lot comes up that doesn’t relate to my company, but it’s worth wading through the irrelevant results to ensure someone isn’t impersonating me. You can set up your own alerts for your company name at Google Alerts and Yahoo Alerts.
• Use Copyscape to find bogus websites using your web content. While Copyscape is widely used to detect online plagiarism, it can also help you find fake sites that have copied your content. When you enter the URL of pages from your company site, Copyscape will identify any sites with identical content.
• Be alert about who is linking to your site. A client recently told me she discovered several porn sites linked to her company site. I guess some might welcome the incoming links, but most businesses would not appreciate the implied affiliation. You can’t prevent someone from linking to your site or force them to remove a link. You can make the request though, and in some cases they will comply. Monitor the external links to your site through Yahoo's Site Explorer or Google's Webmaster Tools. After you register your website URL, you can then view a list of sites linking to yours. The Yahoo and Google lists differ, and Google seems to omit some external links. Still, checking both lists should give you a fairly comprehensive view of who is linking and associating themselves with your site and company.
• Monitor the information about your company appearing on blog entries. If someone is ranting about your poor customer service, he has the right to do so. Still, you might learn something to improve your service by reading such a blog. Also, you can search for splogs that may be using your company information. To monitor blogs, go to Technorati or Bloglines and search for your company name.

I realize, as a small business owner, you don’t have a tremendous amount of time for monitoring the online reputation of your company. You don’t have to be fanatical about it though. Just get into the routine of checking the resources I’ve given you once or twice a month. It’s really a small investment of time to protect the solid reputation you’ve worked so hard to build.

So what can you do if you find your web content, company information or logo on someone else’s site? That’s the topic for my next post.