If there’s one thing in life that I love as much as the web, it’s Australian rules football (also known as AFL). Indeed, I often like to tease my fiance to be that she’ll always be number two in my life behind my beloved team; the Bombers. So it has been with great intrigue that I’ve followed a particular case that brought the two great loves of my life together… albeit in the ugliest of manners. While the story itself broke weeks ago, I have been watching it unfold patiently waiting for the conclusion to the saga. In the end, it evolved into a classic case study of how not to manage a brand’s reputation online.

The Story

The story began with a group of university students with a similar obsession with AFL. In fact, so enthused were they with the game that they created their own blog called Contested Footy. The blog is humble in nature, providing commentary and analysis of the game. During an interview one of the founders claimed the blog receives up to a thousand visitors a day. However, in my opinion this is likely to be the absolute maximum capacity they have achieved. Based on external traffic indicators (Alexa ranking & user comments) I’d guess that their daily traffic is likely to be significantly lower, perhaps even below 50 a day.

In other words, Contested Footy is a small-time blog run by a group of die-hard fans. Hardly the type of publication to threaten a commercial enterprise such as the AFL. However… that didn’t prevent the AFL from gunning for them. On April 29, they sent a ‘cease and desist’ email to the creators of the blog, claiming the AFL owned all trademarks and intellectual property relating to the league, including club logos and images (even those taken at the game independently by the blog contributors).  They demanded that the blog remove all relevant material protected by their IP. The AFL was marking its territory. David vs Goliath in its truest form. And it stank…

Technically, the AFL has every right to protect its intellectual property. Media providers pay premium prices for exclusive coverage of the AFL. And it is these very broadcast agreements that have led to the league’s commercial prosperity within the country. However, these laws are in place to protect media suppliers from competitors and rivals. They exist to protect the integrity and value of the broadcast deal. They don’t exist to absolutely exclude any form of alternative commentary on the sport. The legal grounding of the AFL’s claims are extremely weak. The key issue is that the boys at Contested Footy are not competitors to the mass media empires. They’re little more than fans with a passion for the game. And that is where the true problem lies. The AFL is gunning for its’ fans.

The Reaction

Predictably, the move has been met with widespread hostility from the football community. A post on the Contested Footy blog explaining the situation received over 100 comments, most of which were scathing in their view of the situation:

• “Remember when it used to be about the footy? Tell ‘em to get nicked“
• “It amazes me that a commercial enterprise such as the AFL tries to engender loyalty to the code and the clubs on one hand, and tries to collectively smack a “non-official” site over the head with the other hand. Just another example of corporate greed gone too far“
• “The AFL is run by F***wits but we knew that already“
• “If they were smart they would engage with this blog (and the dozens of others) in a positive way, rather than sending out hysterical legal letters. Just makes them look like overly officious tools“
• “In my opinion, the AFL should be paying you, not threatening you. Oh well, sometimes dinosaurs should just left to die.”

To make matters worse, the story was picked up by a range of mass media outlets, most of which offered a negative commentary based upon quotes and interviews with the founders of Contested Footy:

• AFL contests fan blog site – The Age
• AFL cracks down on student-run footy blog – Herald Sun
• Footy geeks defy ban on AFL blog – The Age
• Interview on ABC Radio

In its defense, the AFL claimed it was protecting it’s brand. Patrick Keane, media manager for the AFL, offered the following comment:

“It’s something that we regularly follow with any area, such as websites, such as media outlets, selling AFL photographs attached to a commercial sponsor without the permission of the player concerned. For editorial use there is no issue, but for anything attached to commercial relationship, no. It’s exactly the same as any organisation would do to protect its commercial right.”

Ironically, a move aimed at “protecting” the brand has delivered the AFL a PR disaster. Karmic intervention some might say. For the record, the commercial relationship Keane refers to is the use of Google Adsense on the blog… an advertising stream that nets most bloggers less than $100 a month. And for the boys at Contested Footy, I’d bet my house that they’re raking in less than $20 via Adsense. Which means that in essence, the AFL created this mess for the sake of $20 a month. Smart! Chalk this one up as a win for the AFL’s lawyers…

Well played chaps!

Of course, the AFL’s attitude towards consumer generated media represents a massive missed opportunity. Few brands can engender the type of passion and interest that the AFL generates from its customers. Indeed, marketers across the globe are busily devising strategies to get their customer’s talking about their brand online. Yet in their wisdom, the AFL has chosen to stifle it on external sites, and ignore applications of it on its’ own site. So instead, punters flock towards consumer driven sites like Big Footy, which despite being run on a shoestring, wouldn’t trail the official AFL site in terms of traffic by a significant margin.

Again… well played chaps.

Do you think they’ll ever get it…?

Anyone that follows the internet marketing community Sphinn would have noticed the linkbait storm that erupted over the last few days. For those that missed out, Lyndon Antcliff went public with an outrageously successful linkbait case study, in which he generated half a million page views and media mentions from Fox News and The Sun newspaper (Note – Lyndon later pulled the article from his site due to the ensuing controversy). Social media was the catalyst that allowed the story to snowball (Digg in particular). The only problem was that the article at the centre of the case study was a fake. The story, which included tales of 13 year old boys stealing their father’s credit card in order to hire hookers and rack up a $30,000 debt, was a complete fabrication…

Naturally, this raised a number of issues within the digital marketing community, including:

1. The ethical considerations of publishing deliberately false information for commercial gain.
2. The obligation of offline journalists to check their facts.
3. The implication such a successful case study will have on linkbait and social media activity in the future.

The debate has raged passionately over at Sphinn – you can catch it here if you’re interested. For what’s it’s worth I consider the tactic unethical, although I do admire Lyndon for his courage in running with it and then going public. The point I am more interested in discussing however is reputation management. The community at Sphinn seem to have a firm grasp of the importance of reputation management. Indeed, we’ve seen 4 reputation management articles hit the front page of Sphinn in the last week:

1. Before your reputation needs cleaning up
2. Angry? Destroy their reputation online
3. A new wave of reputation management issues
4. 50+ sites to help you bury negative posts about you or your company

Given the support (aka votes) shown for reputation management as an issue, you’d expect it to be at the forefront of the community’s mind. So I found it interesting that many in Sphinn didn’t see this issue as reputation management dilemma for our own industry. Indeed, many advocated Lyndon’s ingenuity. Let’s think about it from the publics perspective though – marketers fabricating stories to attract traffic, links and media attention for their clients. Hmmm… doesn’t sound like a public relations winner to me.

Digital marketers are already on fairly shaky ground to begin with. In the eyes of the public, we’re already responsible for ruining the search engines and email (blackhat SEO & spam). Do we really want to add social media to the list? Some people would argue with me, but I believe social media carries a fair degree of credibility at the moment. Sure… sensationalism is widespread. But there’s also a whole lot of good stuff for the serious social media user. This credibility is at risk however if fabrication becomes a mainstream tactic.

The real question I’m posing is whether we are selfish in our definition of reputation management? Does it only extend to the reputations of ourselves and our clients? Are we not concerned about how our profession is perceived as a whole..?