A couple of days ago the China Daily ran an interesting story on the issue of companies paying for positive posts and paying to delete negative posts:
An underground business, that charges companies high fees to delete negative news or posts against them, has been flourishing in the run-up to World Consumer Rights Day today, normally regarded as the most important day to highlight a company’s good reputation.
Such business operators describe themselves as “public relation experts for dealing with crises” and release their mobile phone numbers or contact details through online instant messaging programs such as QQ on the Internet.
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Insiders told METRO they work like agents for companies or individuals worried about online scandals or negative reports and persuade portals reproducing or forwarding such information to delete it.
An operator surnamed Wu with Han De Kai Si Crisis Dealing Experts Company, told METRO on Sunday they normally charge 600 to 800 yuan per post deleted. He revealed there were usually two ways to deal with such business crises, including paying insiders within websites to delete online information and hiring people to release positive posts with the same titles as negative posts.
This is an issue that anyone working in the PR industry in China encounters. It’s often seen as an easier way to deal with negative publicity than addressing root problems. And it sucks. It hinders the professionalization of the PR and media industries, alienates consumers, and keeps people from developing more constructive ways to engage their audiences in China. But as long as it looks like an easy way to manage problems, people will continue to do it.
Let me be clear: Killing forum posts and negative articles does not constitute “dealing with a crisis”. It constitutes papering over a crisis and stores up trouble for the future.
It was interesting to see the China International PR Association (CIPRA) just a couple of days after this article release guidelines (中文) for Internet communication that specifically prohibits deleting negative posts. But this is not a new problem and it’s hard to believe that many of the companies that do this will be too mindful of CIPRA guidelines. And larger agencies that should be mindful of CIPRA guidelines are often happy to use intermediaries to do the hands-on work.
Sam Flemming of CIC data has recently written about how attempts to delete negative comments are backfiring on one major company. Hopefully as time goes by, more constructive approaches will become the norm.
There’s also a problem of companies paying such agencies to post negative comments about competing brands. We attempted a listening campaign for one of our clients, but the data was unreliable thanks to many of the complaints being unfounded.
It’d be good to find one of the people — I’ve heard they are students — that are paid to write the comments. An interview would be a great idea for a blog post; I’d love to hear how it really works.
The ethics of the above are not an issue. Listening and engaging with customer complaints is fundamental to every business. Deleting negative comment in that context is not helpful to anyone.
The ethical dilemma for many businesses working in the PRC market is the systematic negative comment generated and paid for by competitors. Across a number of industries I’ve watched systematic campaigns of disinformation and defamation on particular brands and companies. You can only presume that these campaigns were funded by competitors.
What does a business do in this context? Addressing complete untruths or ‘customer’ complaints from non-existant customers is quite difficult from a PR context.
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Great post Mr. Thief, or Mr. Image. I think your point is well taken about how this doesn’t really get to the root of the problem. But what are you going to do when you don’t want to change the way you do things and only want to make it look like you’ve changed the way you do things.
Chris, that’s interesting that some companies pay people to post negative things about companies. WOW!
Anyway… I posted this up on our site and talked about it in our new podcast. M and Mx Radio. Hope you like it and enjoy the shout out!
Hey, Magnus. I very much appreciate the shout-out. Cool podcast. As an ex-radio guy, I have to say, you definitely have the voice for it. (The swill oil thing, though…I really didn’t need to hear that.)
And you can just call me Will. Mr. Thief is my father.
This is an ugly practice and the CIPRA effort is not going to have any significant impact. The root cause of this issue doesn’t stem from PR firms, it comes from the regular practice of government propaganda departments that have been doing this for a long time.