Spam can be dangerous to a company’s reputation

We usually think of spam as unsolicited advertisements peddling things that we don’t want and don’t care about, but spam can take many forms, including attempts to spread false rumors. Some such viral emails may be just hoaxes, while others may be spread with the intent of doing harm to a company’s or an individual’s reputation. I’ve seen dozens of these, and recently wrote about them.

Many of these virtual rumor-mills revolve around distributing emails having to do with political issues. Most recently is the one that has gained a lot of attention and has spread very quickly. The email purports to have been written by a Navy SEAL, complaining that President Obama delayed a decision to deploy the SEALS in the recent pirate hostage standoff. According to an MSNBC report this week, although the email may well have been written by a Navy SEAL, the claims are bogus. The report includes a timeline of actual events that discredits the email.

The danger of spam goes far beyond the annoying and time-consuming issues–it can easily be used as a weapon to discredit a company (or in this case, the President). Other rumors have been circulating on the Internet for years concerning some companies. Microsoft is a frequent target (remember the one that claimed to be from Microsoft, and if you sent the email to enough people, you’d get paid?), and there was one that even promised free beer. Too good to be true, but the prospect of a coupon for a free six-pack fooled a lot of people into thinking Miller Brewing Company was tracking emails (still not a technological possibility) and would give everybody a free six-pack if the viral email distribution hit two million people. There’s still another completely disgusting one I won’t get into about the Olive Garden restaurant–again not true. Still another one I received recently showed a young Iranian boy who appeared to be having his arm crushed by an automobile. The email claimed that it was an Islamic law punishment for stealing a loaf of bread; in reality the photos were from a street performance and the boy’s arm was not really being crushed.

How do companies handle these sorts of email-based rumors, hoaxes and smear campaigns? They are more common than we realize, and almost impossible to extinguish. Nonetheless, if the rumor is harmful, a vigorous PR campaign is in order, as well as submitting it to anti-hoax Web sites like snopes.com and hoax-slayer.com, and doing your own blogging and social media campaigns to promote evidence to show the original email is false.