January 4th, 2013

Using Sandy Hook Massacre for Law Firm Marketing? (Updated x2)

1/4/13 – Update – this post has been modified where indicated to remove the name of a law firm and add the name of marketing firm. Explanation below.

1/9/13 – Update – The comment might have been left by a “Negative SEO” company trying to use this blog to damage someone else. Explanation below.
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I’ve written before about the dangers of lawyers outsourcing their marketing to others, because marketing and legal ethics are intertwined. Thus was born the simple formula:

outsourcing marketing = outsourcing ethics

But it isn’t just ethics that get outsourced. Those who outsource their marketing are also outsourcing their brains. Why? Because now you have an agent writing on the web on your behalf. The fact that something might not violate the code of professional responsibility doesn’t mean it isn’t stupid and humiliating.

Now comes today’s example. In late December I wrote about a fundraising event for Sandy Hook (12 Miles to Newtown). I don’t need to explain the many levels of horribleness of the massacre of children.

But because the New Jersey law firm of [redacted] apparently outsourced its marketing, this piece of tripe was posted in the comments:

Its a good way to show that, people are still care for each others.
Thanks for this!!!
It was a phase which is gone so now we have to move on.

The writer is listed as haddonfield new jersey law firm, which is obviously the first clue to spam. The second clue is the link to the website embedded with the name. The third clue is the Gmail address of [email protected].

But the final clue is, of course, the meaningless gibberish, which is definable as crap unrelated to the posting. Really now, “It was a phase which is gone so now we have to move on”?

Congrats to [redacted] for having someone write this in their name. Well played gentlemen, well played.

And now an offer to the firm — an idea I poached from Popehat and have used before— if you are willing to cough up the name of your godawful marketing company, I will modify this post.
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1/4/13 Update: Last night Drew Rigler of Impact Internet Marketing in New Jersey contacted me via email, aghast at what had happened. His small company does the Internet marketing for the law firm.

He says that everything they currently do is in house, and that their one attempt to outsource the creation of an app did not work out well. There isn’t anybody overseas that is paid to make comments on blogs. (The IP address for the comment spam says India.)

As I type, he said he is scrambling to find out how this happened. Now you would think that anyone looking to save their skin would claim to be aghast, right? But Rigler had this to say also, in his very first email to me:

I stand by our client and if you wish to drag anyone through the mud, feel free to use my name, my company, but not the great lawyers and team at [the law firm that hired us]. This is in no way reflective of them as a company or a firm.

That is an upstanding comment to make that I simply can’t take issue with.

I expect to update this again after Rigler completes his investigation. Since he (and the law firm) have a vested interest in finding out who did this and why, I expect that I will hear back from them.
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1/4/13 Update – Rigler got back to me again to let me know that their current belief is that a “Negative SEO” company was trying to damage the law firm, by dropping comment spam here and hoping that I would write about it. While I know there are bad people in this world — and that such black hat tactics might go on in politics — I never knew that a company could be founded on that principle and then target lawyers for its “marketing.”

And yet, Rigler tells me that such a company had actually pitched its services to one of the lawyers previously, which they obviously rejected, and then two bits of subtle attack popped up. One was here and one was elsewhere (which he showed me). He also gave me a link to the company that does it, which I won’t share so as not to give it any link juice.

Why did this happen? Was it anger by a company whose entreaties were spurned? A competitor hiring it? Someone testing the waters to see what happens? I don’t know.

Caveat Jurista.

May 11th, 2011

Keeping Blog Spam At Bay (Akismet and WordPress)

Over at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield had a nice little piece about a spammer claiming to go by the name of Tom Sanders. “Tom,” it seems, wants Greenfield to pay him money to leave blog comment spam. Greenfield — noting that he got 500 comment spams overnight — has some fun with this pathetic excuse for a human.

And so I wondered, how much blog comment spam do I get? I’ve had spam problems before, most irritatingly from law firms because they should know better than to outsource their marketing since it’s tied to ethics. But I don’t get as much as I used to.

Why has the problem seemed to diminish for me? After I changed over to WordPress from Blogger a year ago, my techie guy installed a widget called Akismet. Not only does it do a great job keeping out the spam — I just checked and saw 23,000+ were blocked in the last 60 days — but it has a great feature that I use that Blogger didn’t have when I left it.

And that feature is that, when spam comes through, I get the pleasure of marking it as spam. And Akismet learns from it. The info is sent to its central computer brain, and applies it to its database. In other words, when the spam comes in I get the satisfaction of knowing I am helping to block that loser from getting spam through to others. It is, as far as I can tell, the only good part about spam; I get to give the spammer an electronic kick in the shins.

Here is a little bit more about how it works:

When comments are submitted to your blog, the Akismet plugin analyses them, consults the Akismet servers, and if the comment is identified as spam, it moves the comment to your spam section. The comments remain there so that you can review them if you wish. If you do nothing, Akismet will delete it in 15 days, but if you review a comment and decide that it is not spam, when you click the not spam link, this sends details about the comment to the Akismet servers so that they can learn from your decisions. As more users put the service on their blogs, it gets better and better at identifying what is spam from what is not. Imagine the power behind that, and how much it could add to email spam suppression if they could apply that to email!

Of course, there is at least one law professor that actually likes spam. Go figure. I assume it’s because no one reads the blog and pays it much attention. So go follow Greenfield’s link and be sure to let said blogger know that, in the wise words of so many spammers: Your site is very useful. I will bookmark it for later use. Or, you can use the elegant prose of this literary giant:

If possible, as you on expertness, would you brainpower updating your blog with more information? It is hellishly utilitarian in behalf of me.

December 22nd, 2009

Accidents Direct Is Spamming Me

Apparently, yet another one of the many accident attorney search companies failed to get the memo: If you drop comment spam in my blog I will give you more than you bargained for. Reading the “Notice to Spammers” in the sidebar would have been helpful.

So Accidents Direct, a company I never previously heard of, appears to think it would be nice to come over to my little piece of property here and put graffiti on my house.

Notice to those lawyers that are thinking of hiring Accidents Direct: If you outsource your marketing to this outfit, then you run the risk of outsourcing your ethics to a spammer. That is probably not what you want to do.

Oddly enough, this is a U.K. company, so they also appear to be wasting money by trying to trash my site.

But perhaps the worst part is that the spammer, who identifies herself as “Catherina,” elected to insult me in the process, starting her spam with this:

your blog is awesome and informative. Our service is also similar, I hope it will be useful to your visitors too….

Gives me shudders.

If enough people out the spammers, whose conduct further hurts the reputations of attorneys, then fewer people/companies will spam.

December 3rd, 2009

Martindale-Hubbell Q&A On Spam Campaign; Promises Full Accounting; Will Attempt to Notify All Victims

Martindale-Hubbell, the 140 year old attorney directory company, has responded to questions raised after it’s agent was caught sending spam to law blogs. Among its promises are a full public accounting for the incident(s) and an attempt to notify all of the law blogs that were defaced by its spammer.

Earlier this week I noted that MH was spamming my blog. MH subsequently acknowledged that they outsourced marketing to another company that spammed blogs, and also offered to answer questions about the incident.

The questions/answers below were too long for comments, and are presented here. Responses comes from Derek Benton, Director of International Operations at Martindale Hubbell International:

ET: If MH claims to be a leader in social media, why is it outsourcing the social media to others?

DB: In this case we were outsourcing our SEO to an agency, just as we outsource plenty of other Web pieces. The team in the UK (MHI) recently changed to a new CMS [ed: content management system] and as a result we saw a drop off in traffic to our co.uk. site. To quickly address the issue, we hired an agency in late September to help bring our traffic back up to pre-CMS deployment numbers. We didn’t have the bandwidth on our team to do it ourselves. We hired the agency with the understanding that we would approve everything and that has not been the case. The agency’s understanding was different. We are now discussing why there was a miscommunication. All SEO work with this vendor has been halted whilst we investigate.

ET: After MH outsourced to Gilroy’s company, did Gilroy outsource it elsewhere?

DB: Yes he did. Outsourcing is a common practice to help reduce labour costs.

ET: Will MH make the results of its internal investigation public, so that others can learn from it?

DB: Absolutely. We’d be happy to have somebody do a guest blog post on the matter here if you’d like?

ET: Will MH identify the blogs that were defaced by Gilroy’s company? Because they have that information for you. (Gilroy’s site includes this feature: “We offer the following link building submission service … if you want it, we’ll give you a screenshot for each submission. This way you will know the job has been done really well.”

DB: I can’t answer this on behalf of another company, but will try to find out. The quote and link you used above actually relates to their directory submission service, so I don’t know whether the screenshot applies in this instance.

ET: Will MH follow-up with each of the blogs that were defaced?

DB: Per the above, if we can identify them, absolutely.

ET: I note on your blog that MH is holding a webinar on social media, which is “a series of online events bringing together some of the legal profession’s top social media evangelists to share their knowledge and tips on the practical uses of social media.” (Irony noted.) Will you be using this experience as a teaching moment?

DB: We’ve certainly learned from the experience, yes. That said, our webinar series is more about bringing experts together to discuss key issues than it is about us (MH) broadcasting our opinions. We’re not for a minute defending spamming, nor have we ever done so, I’m not sure whether there’s a teaching moment in there. Don’t spam is about the extent of it.

Links to this post:

December 11 roundup
Key Obama regulatory appointees at NHTSA (auto safety) and FTC [commerce, antitrust] used to work for AAJ, the trial lawyers’ lobby [Wood, PoL]; “Adventures in Lawyer Advertising: Muscle, Talent, Results, and Terrible Acting” [Above the …

posted by Walter Olson @ December 11, 2009 12:11 AM

Flip Side of the Spam Scam
Scammer/Spammers are nothing if not agile. And so, while Eric the Turk at New York Personal Injury Blog pursues the scandalous Martindale-Hubbell Spammer-Palooza, fellow New York blawger Andrew Bluestone at New York Attorney Malpractice …

posted by SHG @ December 04, 2009 10:36 AM

December 1st, 2009

Martindale-Hubbell Apologizes For Blog Spam; Suspends Spammer; Promises to Answer Questions

Martindale-Hubbell has apologized for blog spam left on my site, using the comments area of my prior post for that purpose. MH has also agreed to publicly answer questions about the incident.

According to Derek Benton, the Director of International Operations at Martindale Hubbell International, it is not the company’s policy to spam blogs, but that “it appears that a vendor acting on our behalf may have done so.” That vendor/spammer is a British marketing outfit called Conscious Solutions, whose Sales and Marketing Director, David Gilroy, posted in the comments yesterday to take responsibility for what happened.

Conscious Solutions claims on its home page that part of its mission is “search engine optimisation and other online marketing techniques helps drive more revenue into your firm.” Does spamming law blogs drive revenue to MH?

After apologizing, Gilroy went on to write that “we do look for opportunities to comment on blogs, but the comment you identified should NEVER have been posted on ANY blog….” In other words, it is the clear tactic of the marketers to run around and comment on blogs for the purpose of dropping links. Bloggers, of course, see our comment areas as forums for discussion, not as walls for graffiti.

Why drop links in the comments of an old, popular post? It surely can’t be for readers, since the post is two years old. It can, therefore, only be intended to increase Google Pagerank.

Note to Gilroy: Comments on this blog, and oh so many others, are coded as “nofollow.” Nofollow is the direction to Google not to give any Google juice to the link. It is my understanding that this is the default on Blogger and many other popular blog platforms. I also expect that, with your expertise is marketing and search engine optimization, you already knew that. So you are not only defacing blogs with spam, but you are also wasting the money of the people that hired you.

[Addendum: Google’s Webmaster Central Blog just posted on this subject: Hard Facts About Content Spam, h/t Richard Hornsby]

But let us return to Martindale-Hubbell, since they hired Gilroy’s company. MH’s Benton went on to say in the comments that “We’re in the process of getting to the bottom of what happened so that we can do everything possible to make sure it doesn’t happen again. In the meantime the vendor has been instructed to stop all activity on our behalf.”

My opinion here is that suspension isn’t enough. Defacing law blogs is clearly reprehensible. All the more so since MH is in the law blog business.

The only way to stop blog spam is to publicize the names of the lawyers/companies that hire them. I have that policy noted in the side bar to the right.

There is no choice for MH but to fire the company, and to do it publicly. Because that is the only way to stop the practice. Marketers/spammers should know that they will lose business by spamming, not gain it.

Now on to the last part of Benton’s comment, where wrote that he would be “more than happy to address any other questions you might have, either here or via email at derek dot benton at martindale dot com.”

I prefer to do it here, in public, because I know my blog was not the only one defaced. And a public accounting of what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent it from happening again, is ultimately healthy, even if temporarily painful.

So here are my questions:

1. If MH claims to be a leader in social media, why is it outsourcing the social media to others?

2. After MH outsourced to Gilroy’s company, did Gilroy outsource it elsewhere?

3. Will MH make the results of its internal investigation public, so that others can learn from it?

4. Will MH identify the blogs that were defaced by Gilroy’s company? Because they have that information for you. (Gilroy’s site includes this feature: “We offer the following link building submission service … if you want it, we’ll give you a screenshot for each submission. This way you will know the job has been done really well.”

5. Will MH follow-up with each of the blogs that were defaced?

6. I note on your blog that MH is holding a webinar on social media, which is “a series of online events bringing together some of the legal profession’s top social media evangelists to share their knowledge and tips on the practical uses of social media.” (Irony noted.) Will you be using this experience as a teaching moment?

Links to this post

December 11 roundup
Key Obama regulatory appointees at NHTSA (auto safety) and FTC [commerce, antitrust] used to work for AAJ, the trial lawyers’ lobby [Wood, PoL]; “Adventures in Lawyer Advertising: Muscle, Talent, Results, and Terrible Acting” [Above the …

posted by Walter Olson @ December 11, 2009 12:11 AM