Negative Publicity

[jpopovic]

Here is an example of something going viral with some interesting implications.

My good friend Brad Gosse is a very experienced Internet marketer. He recently lauched a free sample campaign for one of his MLM businesses. His free sample offer was picked up on a discussion board:

http://www.redflagdeals.com/forums/s...d.php?t=680863

Most of the commenters were negative and many were questioning his offer. I know personally, his offer was totally legit. Eventually, there were people arguing about whether his offer was clean, whether they should try it or leave it alone, etc...

Bottom line, it drew HUGE traffic to his site. It was picked up by other message boards and he got 1000s of opt-ins onto his list. Mostly because people were arguing the validity of his offer.

So the lesson learned was, sometimes negative publicity can turn into a positive and you can build some serious contacts. As long as your offer is legit and delivers on your promise...take the publicity

[vincent-v]

It really is true what they say - negative publicity is an urban myth in most cases. Most of the time, there is a different term used when too much public pessimism affects a company in a short period of time: "Public Relations Disaster". You usually have to mess things up pretty bad for something like that to happen. It's not as if anyone should go around trying to drum up negative publicity. My belief is just that small companies will usually benefit from anything that brings them out from under the radar, good or bad. For them, any attention at all is a good thing.

[Logan]

Thanks for sharing, it is an interesting scenario.

I agree regarding publicity, but after reviewing your friends situation I am curious how much his costs have bceen for sending out free samples and what his response rate has been?

I once worked with a coffee company. They had a function on their site where visitors could request a free sample to be mailed to them, similar to your friends. Their offer was promoted in some of the popular free offer websites, and they received an overwhelming number of requests for samples. Swamped, literally.

When all was said and done, these were not people who ended up ordering their product based on the sample. These were people who just look for free offers on the net, with no interest in future purchasing.

If you notice your thread referenced, this sort of behavior is even mentioned by some of those who did order. "I got the chocolate, and pitched the letter about the affiliate program". My experience with getting a ton of requests from a free offer site is that often it does not provide a return, and costs can be substantial.

In contrast, when we received requests for samples from visitors who were browsing the site and had an interest in the product (coming from non free offer sites such as search, etc) those individuals provided a (very) high roi.

So while I agree with you regarding publicity and getting the word out, not all publicity is effective/converts equally - and in a situation like the one you reference ... it can actually be very time consuming/expensive if they are not qualified.

My question is ... you say there was good traffic, but how much actually converted into business?

That is a lot of samples to send out ... and a waste ... if you are not getting people to follow through on the offer. Can you share more specifics on the amount of actual sales this has generated, based on the samples sent.

[Gate2Shop]

Thats sad that there are people out there that do things like this because sometimes it can be harmful and not just to a persons spirit.

[phanio]

Usually any publicity can be a good thing. Just remeber that when users/customers do come - offer them something that they need, want, or can use.

[janicejan]

after getting negative comments and receiving massive because of negative publicity, we really need to know how to flip the sides or show people that they were wrong on what they were thinking, and this will enable us to generate sales.. but if we just leave it the way it is we may receive those traffic on our site but also creating negative image on us.

[torontoSEOfirm]

I agree that sometimes negative publicity can be a good thing. I wrote a fake news article for one of my websites and the buzz it created ended up getting me 1000's of visits.

[rebelnetworks]

I would like to know if the free sample also worked and what conversion rate of samples sent out to customer orders from the samples sent out - i assume they had some method to track that.

in the end i guess it is about building in opt in mail list, contact list, etc - then being able to leverage those lists into some kind of revenue

[Marykate]

Well they say that any publicity is good publicity, and if people are arguing over something then it makes others take a look. I think back to watching a school fight when you were a kid, invariably kids would gather around the fight.
People seem to love controversy too, think about trashy tabloids, you know you shouldn't be interested but you are.

[acwebguru]

negative publicity is all about balancing act. Here you are trying to make a balance and it should be done with meticulous care because if you fail to put a rein on it it will eventually crash you down and ultimately you will find yourself in a tricky situation from where you will not be able to disentangle yourself.