The short answer is to the question, “How negative can you get with your negative marketing on the internet?” is…. very. In very broad terms: the lower you go, the more likely you are to win in the short-term. But there’s a trade-off: the lower you go, the more people will dislike you and thus the harder it will be to build healthy relationships. You can think of this as a practical application of Machiavelli’s old question: is it better to be loved or respected? Our answer is, respected. They probably don’t love you anyway, so there’s no point in pretending they do or trying to get them to. You won’t. Our rule of thumb is to do everything possible online to completely and utterly crush your opponent’s reputation online — while still following the moral imperative of honesty. In other words, we don’t make up stuff. We don’t lie. That will cause problems on many levels–who wants to work with a liar? Plus, if we lied, it causes many practical problems: they could dispute our claims, saying they’re false (which they would be, if we lied!). But if we selectively harness the truth… then the world is at our disposal. So, the trick is the following: use very creative and subtle means to find everyone who is unhappy with your enemy. Talk to them, one on one. Use the learnings to find out why they hate him: what are his weaknesses? Then, exploit those weaknesses. Does this sound like a compelling strategy to you? Send us an email and we’ll crush your enemies online. It would be a lie if I didn’t admit that I love doing this. Here at Team NOM (Negative Online Marketing), we get pleasure out of this. It’s our masochistic side coming out! The challenge is to do this, all the way, while retaining our complete integrity. This is the line we try to follow. Republished by Blog Post...

A lot of clients, potential clients, naysayers, haters, lovers, and everyone else in the world commonly asks us, “But, do you REALLY think that what you’re doing is ethical? Why can’t you just do POSITIVE online marketing *so everyone just gets along*?” I’ll tell you what: we would LOVE to just do positive online marketing! However, the world is a cruel, hard, cold place. Your competitors are ALREADY doing negative online marketing, tarnishing your brand, posting false reviews on social media sites, and talking smack, spreading lies, slander, and fake gossip about you and your products. The only difference between what they do and what we do is that we don’t delude ourselves or our clients. We don’t tell them that we’re going to run a traditional marketing campaign, and then go behind their backs and write slanderous blog posts on 3rd party websites while having our team in India spam Yelp with fake negative reviews. The main difference between what they do and what we do is that we don’t lie in our negative SEO, Yelp, and TripAdvisor reviews. We don’t write a slanderous reviews on a competitor hotel, saying that their sheets have bed bugs, the concierge tried to molest our wives, and that we found ticks in the hotel omelette (unless this is all true, of course!) We find the flaws in their business. The REAL, TRUE flaws. We find out the REAL, TRUE gossip and expose them for what they are! We don’t want to do business with sleaze bags, and neither do you or your customers. Two of our personal rules that we live and do business by are: #1: Always tell the truth. If it’s made up, don’t post it. #2: We only take on high-quality clients, who develop the best products and give the highest quality customer service. We will never take on a client that wants us to lie for them and make it seem like their product is better than it really is. If we (and you!) follow these two rules…then yes, negative online marketing is ethical. If you don’t…prepare to feel our wrath. Republished by Blog Post...