Update On Bad Publicity

I posted the other day on a world-class bit of legal stupidity where a company threatened a blogger with a lawsuit. Bill Hobbs has been keeping very close tabs on this story since it is local for him. He reports that not only did this backfire for JL Kirk Associates but that it has backfired in a spectacular manner. They have rocketed to the top of the search engine standings. But they will not be at all pleased with being number one with a bullet, so to speak.

WKRN's Brittney Gilbert reports on the saga of JL Kirk Associates, a critical blogger, and a lawsuit threat that backfired big time. Also, "S-Town Mike" at Enclave has more on JL Kirk Associates' new-found online fame.

And it's not good fame: the story, and the controversy over JL Kirk Associates threatening to sue Coble for writing critically of the company on her blog has surfaced other bloggers with similar experiences and first-hand criticisms of the company. Even worse, people who before this week had never heard of JL Kirk Associates now only have a bad impression of the company. People like Billy Hollis at QandO, who wrote:

I don't know squat about JL Kirk, or about their law firm King & Ballow. But I can say with some confidence that neither of them has a clue just how information is spread in the world today.

For many firms in the service industry, their reputation is the single most important asset they have. And how do most modern people assess reputation? By Internet searching, primarily Google. You can literally destroy your own company overnight by doing something really stupid, if the results of that stupidity will be one of the first things that show up on Google when a search of your company name is done. It looks like JL Kirk has just done this.

That pretty well wraps it right up, too. The folks who pushed this idea, whether it was management or the law firm, have no clue what they have done to themselves at this point. My best guess is that JL Kirk Associates will end up closing that office as a result of this flap in the near future. Because they are dead, reputation-wise. Anyone searching Google will read all the negatives first - think anyone will risk using them after reading that? Boy, this one is a textbook example for businesses of how to ruin yourself in the age of the internet.