The Naked Blogger Peter Maling, a retired teacher, initiated a blogging war against Serenata Flowers recently after they kept sending spam to his blog in-box. After reading his rants about them I thought he must have been besieged with a thousand comments a day but no: he sent a polite email after the third, phoned them after the fourth and initiated all out war after the fifth. Even after he started complaining, a Serenata ad appeared on the GoogleAds bar on his blog, which appears to have added fuel to his fire.
The tactic was simple - he posted a not entirely sympathetic (and, I suspect, not entirely truthful) entry on his blog that said Serenata was "rubbish... ridiculously overpriced" and that a friend's wedding was "ruined by these cowboys".
Needless to say, plenty of people linked to that, and plenty of people linked to them, and more people linked to them... Consequently Maling's mini-campaign to discredit Serenata has managed to shuffle its way up Google's mysterious algorithms and now ranks third on search results for "serenata flowers". Not insignificant for that business which is actually fairly highly regarded in online business terms.
So I contacted Serenata about this, and MD Peter Ahl responded in suitably florid language about the company's recent "markerting faux pas".
"There's no excuse for the dodgy practice of comment spam. As bloggers ourselves, we should have known better.
"Somewhere between our love for flowers and our desire to be known as the florist of distinction that we believe ourselves to be, we overzealously teamed up with a third-party search marketeer. What promised to be a tour-de-force turned out to be a joyride: our marketeer certainly succeeded in getting our name out there, but we don't get our kicks from that kind of cheap thrill.
"We've always tried to do things a bit differently, but we never intended that difference to cross into the territory of common, human principles. We can't undo the umbrage we've caused with our comments, but we can promise that they've stopped - as has our relationship with the person in question. We can also promise that we'll be sure to interrogate the tactics of prospective partners before embarking on any more online (and offline) marketing.
To Peter at nakedblog.com we offer our sincere apologies, not only for wasting his time and money with spam comments, but for transgressing the unspoken social contract of the blogosphere."
"In short, we are embarrassed to have been involved with spam commenting, however innocuous. We take full responsibility for what happened and really are very sorry to have been involved in the polluting of people's blogs with self-seeking links.Nigerian 419ers
"But we're also very grateful to Peter and the other bloggers for prickling our conscience and reminding us that it's our love for flowers that must always come first, not our quest for fame - and that means checking very carefully where we're sowing our seeds."
