IMV5 : Brand Terrorism

The following is a transcript for IMV5 : Brand Terrorism. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast brought to you by MindComet. And now, here’s your host, Ted Murphy.

Ted Murphy:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo episode five. I'm your host Ted Murphy, and with me today is Senior VP of Sales and Strategy for MindComet, Paul Lewis. Welcome to the show today, Paul!

Paul Lewis:

Good to be here, Ted.

Ted Murphy:

Paul, today we're here to talk about brand terrorism. It sounds like something that's pretty scary. And I know for a lot of brands out there, it definitely is. Simply put, what is brand terrorism?

Paul Lewis:

That's when an individual or a group of people maliciously attack a company or its products. We define these people as brand terrorists.

Ted Murphy:

So is this something that's exclusive to the Internet?

Paul Lewis:

Actually, no. Brand terrorism in different forms has been around for quite a while. However, the Internet has really empowered single individuals or small groups to use the Internet and computers as a force multiplier of their efforts.

Ted Murphy:

So this is something – maybe we would call a brand terrorist of yesterday would be someone who would say get a candy bar, and they wouldn't be happy with the candy bar. So they would go out and they would picket in front of a company, or they would write a local reporter saying that they're unhappy with it, or that it’s doing something wrong for them. That would be brand terrorism of yesterday?

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, that's right. I mean, we actually would classify that as a Class B type event, which is actually a complaint that has some basis, at least from the consumer’s perspective, but it still has a very negative impact to the brand. And then we have different levels. A Class A event is where something is actually a fraudulent or a malicious attack. And we're seeing a lot more of that in modern times.

Ted Murphy:

So I guess the big difference between what used to happen and what's happening now is that before it was this one individual and this individual would be jumping up and down and screaming at the top of their lungs. And to be honest, there wasn't a big outlet for him. There wasn't a way for him to really spread the word.

And the difference is now what you're saying. The Internet's a force multiplier in allowing this person to take that message, or take that movement, and use computers and the Internet to really get the word out or to make the attack larger.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, that's exactly right. Before, these events tended to be locally isolated. And now, through the advent of the modern age and modern technology, they can spread worldwide in nanoseconds.

Ted Murphy:

So what are some of the forms of modern brand terrorism?

Paul Lewis:

Well, some of the earliest forms that we've seen are called denial of service attacks. And this has been around for quite some time now on the Internet. Which basically is where these hackers, or terrorists, write programs that flood a particular web site with requests, and basically overpower that web site so that no one can access the information.

Ted Murphy:

So what happens is their just basically bringing the site down for whatever reason. I'm upset at that company. Let's target this company and let's bring them down so that their web site can't be active.
So I know that that's evolved over time, and now we're looking at more of like online vandalism and defacement. What are the types of things that are going on there?

Paul Lewis:

Well, that's where hackers are attacking these sites. They're getting in. They're changing information. They may change prices. They may upload photos, inappropriate materials to put on the site to basically impact the brand.

Ted Murphy:

So we actually see some of that stuff on the news every once in a while, where a big software company or something like that, someone will broken into their web site and actually post pornographic pictures or done other things. And obviously that can have a pretty negative impact on the brand. And for people to be even be aware of that, people have such distaste for an individual brand, that in itself can actually have some negative repercussions.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think that those two really focus on the IT areas, typically. I think that marketing and public relations people who are listening to this are thinking of that as relegated over into the IT area. But I think it's important to understand that this kind of crosses different functional boundaries. Yes, those are part of IT, but it goes into that next phase, which is definitely part of PR and marketing.

Ted Murphy:

And it's interesting how that's actually followed the Internet as it progress. Because when the Internet first came out, it was really an IT type of thing. And you had a whole bunch of nerdy people out there using their computers, and putting up little web pages, and things like that. And now the Internet is really more of a marketing vehicle than anything else. So how did those attacks evolve, and how are they impacting marketers?

Paul Lewis:

Well, one of the things that has progressed in recent years is that the whole fact everyone's talking about blogs and consumer generated media. And obviously, that's the buzz in marketing these days. But there's kind of a few levels that occur out there with consumer-generated media.

On one level, you have individuals, as we talked about before, who have a complaint or something that they are unhappy about. And so they become very vocal and use the Internet as a force multiplier to bring attention to that.

Ted Murphy:

So that would be like a Jeff Jarvis talking about Dell and his experience there, and what he did with his blogs, and how that whole thing kind of exploded and eventually you saw it in the Wall Street Journal?

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, that's a perfect example. And we would call that a Class B event, which is where a consumer has what, at least from the consumer's perspective, is a legitimate event that they're unhappy about, and that they're trying to resolve through these new mediums.

At the same time though, we've also begun to see what we call Class A events. And that's where international groups have begun to maliciously spread negative information – intentionally spread negative information about companies and brands that are – is completed fraudulent and typically is an attack to try to cause them to lose brand equity.

Ted Murphy:

So what would be an example of something like that?

Paul Lewis

A good example, we saw a very high profile international electronics manufacturer was the victim of a Class A event. We tracked some of the original posts back to they were in blogs and other things that were basically saying that the products were defective, that there were problems with returns and refunds, and do not buy this.

We tracked some of the original posts back to China. We believe that there was a competitor in that region or a competitor that had contacted individuals in that region to begin to spread these rumors. But the problem is that once that stuff gets into the blogosphere, it can just take off so virally and so quickly and spread very, very quickly.

Ted Murphy:

Yeah, I remember that when we were working on that, that the scary thing was that it didn’t really take much to get the ball rolling. It took only a handful of posts that – to get people to actually start talking about this. All of a sudden, this claim with no basis at all suddenly became fact. And that fact just started spreading throughout the Internet as if it was real.

Paul Lewis

Yeah, exactly. I think that when people read information on the Internet, they still feel like that's information in print, and they're still giving it a lot of credibility. And especially when they read it in multiple sources, they give it a lot of credence.

Ted Murphy:

All right. Well, now let's talk about email. I've seen some crazy stuff going on here. What's freaking marketing managers out here? What do they need to look out for?

Paul Lewis:

Well, there's a lot of things that have been happening in email. I think we're all familiar with the phishing scams, which is where people are using your brand. They're putting your logos and all that information into an email and sending it out with the express purpose of trying to get people to click through on that link they provide so that they can get your personally identifiable information.

Ted Murphy:

And you see that all the time with banks. And you see that with eBay. I mean, I don't know how many emails I get on a weekly basis asking me to update my eBay account. And that’s really for people just looking to gather my information, my username, my password, and then be able to take over that account to do fraudulent activities.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, and I think the next thing that we've seen evolve is what we call brand hijacking. And that's where typically individuals or small organizations take a larger companies brand and wrap their email message around that brand to give it more value, when they really have no affiliation or association with the brand, or no authority to send out those kind of messages. But obviously, this can have a very detrimental effect from the consumer's perspective as to what this brand is engaged in, how their contacting people over email, and what these offers are.

Ted Murphy:

So these people are like portraying themselves as officially licensed or somehow associated with this big brand name that has a positive brand equity, and they're riding on that brand equity to then boost their own sales.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, that's exactly right. I think the last thing in email that is very scary, and this goes back to the level of brand terrorism, and again, a Class A event. And what's happening there is again, competitors groups' brand terrorists are sending out emails that appear to be from the brand. They're spamming large numbers of people with very negative information, statements about the brand or problems that have come to light, and they’re completely fraudulent.

But at the same time, those offers can cause a lot of headaches, eroding the brand equity, and for many countries, especially here in the U.S., but in other countries with spam law legislation, it can also cause legal problems. Because the courts look at not just who the sender is, but what is the brand being represented. And they expect you to have some control over that when, in reality, you have very little.

Ted Murphy:

So let's talk about the hottest topic out there, and that's gotta be search. Everybody's talking about what’s going on with the search? Right now, we've got stuff in congress with people dealing with pornographic issues. We've got deals with click fraud. I know that one of the things that we deal with here is SAA. Why don’t you tell our listeners a little bit about what that is?

Paul Lewis:

Well, SAA is search advertising attack. And that's a term we use to define when brand terrorist pays actually groups of people to click on your paid links within a search engine. So what they have is actually farms of people, databases of people all over the world that literally just sit there and click on their competitors' ads and cause you to pay. Each of those are paid transactions. When somebody clicks on your ad on a search engine, you've paid for that. And really by doing that, they’re driving up your costs.

Ted Murphy:

So they're driving up your costs with the hope that you're gonna eventually look back and say, oh, my gosh. It cost me $100 to sell this product that only sells for 50. So I'm not gonna do that anymore. So my – I've got no ROI there. So eventually, I'm gonna jump out of the market and that's gonna cause the price for those keywords to go down. And allow the competitor, the person who's trying to drive that price down, to rise to the top.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, one of the things that's different – I mean, this sounds very similar to click fraud. Click fraud is where an organization that is putting those paid links up on their site are clicking and trying to get compensated from the search engines. And so they're creating fraudulent clicks. And there are some algorithms that can track that, if it's coming from a single IP address, or a known source of problems. Then the search engines can investigate those complaints.

The problem with this type of attack is that it's usually highly organized. It's widely distributed. The IP addresses are unique. And they're not after compensation, they're just after driving your costs up. So it's very, very hard to track and to prove.

Ted Murphy:

So that's on the paid side, but what about organic? I mean, the concept of Google bombs have been around for a while, where people are going out there and doing their best to gain organic rankings. And Google's done a pretty good job with getting a lot of that stuff off their search engines, although we still see instances of new types of technologies and approaches that people are using there.

But a lot of people do invest pretty heavily in organic search optimization. I know that you know that's certainly one of the services that we offer and something we have been able to see great results with. But I know that we have a new advent that's coming out there that is definitely brand terrorism and definitely malicious. And that's the advent of Google Bowling.

Paul Lewis:

Yeah, Google Bowling is sort of the rage in the SEO talk circles right now. And what it really comes down to is that the search engines in an effort to contain the way that people can use back links and rapidly get back links to their site and declared certain areas as known links farm and areas that you don't want to be associated with. So what these search engine terrorists have basically done is that they will throw their competitors and they will actually place positions and links from their competitors from these known bad areas, from link farms, so their links grow exponentially over night from a known problem and then they get actually sandboxed by the search engines. The search engines notice the anomaly and classify them into an area where they drop out of their organic search rankings. So you can have a company that has had a great search engine ranking for many years and all of a sudden dropped down very quickly and their competitors can obviously move up and take that position.

Ted Murphy:

So the concept there is, "You know what? I'm not going to waste my time trying to get my site organically optimized so that it ranks high in the search engines, I'm just going to knock out all my competitors and take them out that way." The scary part about this is that there is relatively low cost for the people that are doing this, and it is often highly organized. If someone wants to take you down it takes a pretty good strategy to be able to fight that and be able to prevail on top.

Paul Lewis:

Exactly.

Ted Murphy:

So talking about fighting this, how do we fight this stuff? This is obviously very scary stuff. What can you do as a brand, as a marketer, as an IT director, to proactively fight this stuff?

Paul Lewis:

Well that's a great point. What we recommend to our clients is a four-point plan. The very first thing they have to do is they have to understand these threats. There are other threats in addition to these, but these are the more prominent right now. So they really need to understand these threats and assess where they currently are at and what’s happening to them in the environment they are in right now.

I think the next thing that every responsible company needs to do is monitoring their brand in the online environment. What's happening? What are people saying? Is that going up or down? Again, these things spread very fast. As you were talking about that Dell situation, I mean that literally escalated in a matter of days from a very isolated incident with a single individual to impacting millions of people and being in major newspapers and other press.

Ted Murphy:

And really, that was only a Class B event. That wasn't even something necessarily malicious. That was just an unhappy customer.

Paul Lewis:

Exactly, so you definitely have to adopt a policy of monitoring your brand. The next thing is you have to have a preplanned comprehensive plan of action of how you are going to deal with different circumstances that are not just may come up, but actually quite likely will come up at some point for your company unfortunately. The very last thing is you have to put in place the resources and the readiness to act. It's great to have a plan, but if nobody is responsible or empowered to act when an event occurs, because response time is a very critical factor in minimizing these events, you have to have to have that preauthorized.

Ted Murphy:

So who's responsible for all of this? It sounds like a lot of work and a lot of stuff to do and a lot of gearing up. Is this a marketing thing? Is it a PR thing? Is it an IT thing? Who's responsible for making all this stuff happen?

Paul Lewis:

Well that's the exact thing a lot of our clients ask too. Well who needs to pay for this? Where is this coming out of? Who ultimately needs to be in charge of this? The answer is, there is no easy answer. This cuts cross functionally across many areas. It is part of IT. It is part of PR and it definitely is a part of marketing and brand image, so its not nicely siloed within one area of the organization. I think that you have to create a cross functional team to discuss and talk about these issues. But ultimately you need to assign a steward to this who bridges all the groups, makes sure the plan is completed and gets the authority and the empowerment to act on the plan based on the events that are defined.

Ted Murphy:

Well Paul, I really appreciate your input on this. I know that you have created a one sheet on this that’s called 'Brand Terrorism Defined' and for out listeners out there you can download the one sheet at InternetMarketingVoodoo.com, click on episode five and you should see a the synopsis of the show. Right below that you will see a link to download that Brand Terrorism Defined PDF. Paul, I appreciate it. Thank you very much for being on the show and it's truly been a pleasure.

Paul Lewis:

Thank you Ted.

Announcer:

For more information on this week’s topic, visit internetmarketingvoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, the Relationship Agency.

[End of Audio]

Marketing Resources
Download Brand Terrorism Defined (PDF - 692KB)

Listen to the Brand Terrorism podcast.

Contact MindComet about developing a proactive strategy to combat Brand Terrorism.

Technorati Tags
brand terrorism, phishing, google bowling, click fraud