black hat pr...

Black Hat PR, black ops PR or just plain smear tactics and putting the boot in. Sometimes competitors will go beyond normal sales tactics and tricks and they'll get a little nasty.

Now, in the 21st Century, nasty can take a lot of shapes:

• Setting up blogs to rubbish your products
• Hammering your products via Twitter
• Impersonating staff online
• Setting up websites which look like concerned consumer groups or press putting the boot in
• Passing on gossip about your failures/negative incidents to the press
• Having people blog negatively about you
• Old-fashioned badmouthing you in the press or sales meetings
• Poster campaigns
• Ad drops
• Distorting statistics or quotes
• Ambushing events - online or offline
• Trying to bring down your site with Denial of Service attacks
• Buying similar domain names and making it look as if your site is gone
• Buying all the Google adwords
• Having the police raid your premises or stop staff, calling in FAST and making sure the media know about it