Online defamation by employees
Only when you wake up one morning to the devastating reality of seeing your company’s reputation tarnished online can you fully appreciate the benefits of having a reliable online reputation alert system.
Would anyone in their right mind wait for a fire to break out before seriously considering insurance? Probably not. Attacks on online reputation spread across the Internet (and then continue to spread offline), in the same way that every fire starts with a single spark, which then quickly turns into huge balls of fire that burn and bring down everything. that I once worked for. Online reputation attacks tend to spread so quickly that they can take down any business that isn’t well equipped to deal with them.
The bigger your business, the stronger the flames. After all, fire has never been known to be deterred by the size of the bush and this is a fact. There is simple math in all of this. The more incendiary Internet posts about your business, the faster it will typically spread: via blogs, web links, Twitter, Facebook, and emails. A single link to a defamatory website about your business can be emailed to a mailing list that could contain thousands of subscribers in less than 5 minutes.
Each recipient of the link can then forward it to their own mailing list, whose recipients can also forward it. In all, it could take 10 minutes or less, for what you’ve worked your entire life, to go up in flames. This is, of course, the worst case scenario. At best, it would take a few days before defamatory web pages about your business take up most of the first page of search engines, for everyone else to see.
Unfortunately, I have seen exactly this course of events happen to an IT company from Israel that had been operating in the UK very successfully for over two years. Having discovered that his UK manager was stealing from the company, the head office in Israel decided to summarily fire him.
The Director, who was well invested in the technical side of the Internet, decided to take revenge by posting negative comments and reviews about his former employer on various websites and forums. The comments explicitly suggested that the company was a fraud and was simply taking their clients’ money and never intended to deliver any work. Shortly after this Director left the company, his UK operation had all but disappeared. The phone stopped ringing and current customers began to leave the company with various excuses.
This unexpected turn of events must have cost the Israeli IT company tens of thousands of pounds. It wasn’t until one of the company’s most loyal customers in the UK indicated that he wanted to terminate his £50,000 contract with the Israeli IT company that the company discovered the mountains of bad publicity they were receiving on search engines. of the Internet in the UK.
The managing director in Israel was shocked to discover how a souring relationship with a disgruntled employee had brought his company’s UK operations to a near standstill. Eventually, the internet defamation lawyer who was hired by the company to save it from further reputational embarrassment, quickly managed to stop the online reputation attacks against the Israeli IT company by its former employee and quickly restore its online reputation. .
The internet online defamation lawyer who acted for the company sent a strong legal letter to the former director, who promptly proceeded to remove all defamatory material from the internet. Had he not done so, the company would have had to apply to the High Court for an injunction to force the defamatory material to be removed.
However, much of the damage to the company had already been done and, following swift action by its internet defamation lawyers, the Israeli IT company quickly managed to restore its UK customer base and, with further advice, began to create a rich online presence in the UK, which would make it much more difficult for anyone in the future to attack him in that way again.