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« Definitive Fred | Main | Doppelganger » April 14, 2007Suing A Blogger: Fifth UpdateWKRN's Brittney Gilbert reports on the saga of JL Kirk Associates, a critical blogger, and a lawsuit threat that backfired big time. Also, "S-Town Mike" at Enclave has more on JL Kirk Associates' new-found online fame. And it's not good fame: the story, and the controversy over JL Kirk Associates threatening to sue Coble for writing critically of the company on her blog has surfaced other bloggers with similar experiences and first-hand criticisms of the company. Even worse, people who before this week had never heard of JL Kirk Associates now only have a bad impression of the company. People like Billy Hollis at QandO, who wrote: I don't know squat about JL Kirk, or about their law firm King & Ballow. But I can say with some confidence that neither of them has a clue just how information is spread in the world today.A commenter at QandO coined a nice new term: "Net lag," which means, "The failure of an individual or group to match the speed of multisource commentary on the Internet which exposes their professional or otherwise general incompetence on an issue which they or their representatives have addressed." Net lag generally refers to the failure of traditional businesses to understand the dynamics of the blogosphere*. Net lag was on huge display in the Kirk/Coble/King & Ballow case this week. Why It's Dumb to Sue or Threaten To Sue Bloggers
Had JL Kirk Associates ignored Coble's blog post (or, better yet, responded positively to her criticisms), Coble's initial critical post would have been read by, statistically speaking, virtually nobody. (No offense intended, Kat!) By threatening to sue her, JL Kirk Associates assured that the post would be read by thousands, and pushed the story to the "top of the charts" on Google, where it will live on for years. Silence Is Deadly Neither its CEO nor any of its "career management" staffers maintain blogs where they discuss career search issues, or how their particular industry or company works. With no blogosphere presence or experience, no company is equipped to handle a blog storm like the one JL Kirk Associates kicked off last week with its ill-advised decision to threaten to sue a blogger. Not having an understanding of the dynamics of the blogosphere, and not having an active, engaged presence in the blogosphere, hobbled JL Kirk Associates - as it would hobble any company faced with a similar situation. Without an active blog presence, any company wanting to respond to criticism like the critical post JL Kirk Associates found on Coble's blog has limited options: Post a hasty response in the bloggers' comments section, or hire a lawyer and try to intimidate the blogger. JL Kirk Associates did both. And blew themselves up in the blogosphere. Other business executives should take a lesson from the JL Kirk Associates debacle: Develop a presence in the blogosphere now, before you need it. Because once you need it, it's too late. If you're a business executive who wants to prepare for the blogosphere, I'd be happy to help. I'd even be willing to consult with the executives at JL Kirk Associates. I won't even ask for my whole fee up-front. Background posts: Update: *A commenter points out the technical roots of the term "net lag." Also in the comments, some very good analysis of why JL Kirk Associates threatened Coble. It has to do with search engine optimization and JL Kirk's Internet-based customer-recruitment model. Update: James Robertson has some comments and a great podcast about PR in the era of blogs. Posted in Journalism & Media
Comments
Excellent post yet again, Bill. RE the silence being deadly - I was thinking last night that may well be the worst mistake not only JL Kirk, but King & Ballow (on their OWN behalf, not on Kirk's), has made yet. King & Ballow may not be as severely bruised as Kirk at this point, but their reputation seems to me pretty sullied due to this humongous blunder in the world of the blogosphere and new media. Posted by: Lynnster at April 14, 2007 2:40 PMAbsolutely right. And particularly right with a company like JL Kirk, that reportedly does its prospecting by monitoring monster.com and other internet resume posting sites. That is, every one of their prospects is an internet user. It is not like they target little old ladies that still have a rotary phone at home. Posted by: Freddy Hill at April 14, 2007 2:42 PM"Netlag" has a longer history than you indicate; see http://jargon.watson-net.com/jargon-print.asp?w=netlag for an example of the original, technical usage. It's interesting to see it applied to people and organizations; that is a very hacker-like extension of language and thus very cool. Posted by: Charles Hardin at April 14, 2007 3:08 PMBill, I think you underestimate the motivation for JL Kirk to silence Katherine Coble's critical blog posting. Yes, her traffic was only registering a relatively small number (one or two hundred) hits per day. But the RELEVANCE of that traffic is what mattered. When someone gets invited to a JL Kirk interview, a logical thing for that person to do is to search for "JL Kirk" or "JL Kirk Associates" on the Internet. According to their keyword selector tool, Yahoo recorded a total of 186 searches on those terms in February, 2007. I imagine there were even more searches on Google. The vast majority of those searches were probably to check out the company. I can't imagine that there are very many people who enter those search terms out of random curiosity. And what used to pop up on Google in response to such a search? JLKirkAssociates.com, bestofiowa.com, iowamall.com, findingrightcompany.jlkirassociates.com, etc., etc. All are aliases or pointers to recruiting information at JL Kirk. All are designed to make the company appear credible and helpful. Someone with some SEO experience went to a lot of trouble to create that favorable picture. Yes, there was one negative site (ripoffreport.com) which tried to link JL Kirk back to its predecessor Bernard Haldane. Not good, but just one negative review which wasn't too clear could be explained away. However, now comes Katherine with a detailed first-person account of her bad experience. I don't know where that blog post originally ranked in the search listings, but my guess is that it was high enough to concern JL Kirk. In fact, it could have been costing them big money, when each client they can close a deal on is worth several thousand dollars. Their total loss could have easily been in the hundreds of thousands. So they tried to silence her and make her take the entire blog post down, which would have soon removed it from the search results. If she had just quietly knuckled under, that demand letter would have been a huge success. Instead it is backfiring big time, as a current search on those keywords will easily demonstrate. Instead of just slow bleeding, JL Kirk may have suffered a mortal wound from the blowback. But I think it's wrong to consider it an unforced error on their part. They tried to staunch the bleeding, and they failed. Posted by: Daniel Wiener at April 14, 2007 3:52 PMThey can't handle the internet, let alone the blogosphere. How many email addresses or full names of people that work there can you find on their website? Posted by: Easycure at April 14, 2007 3:54 PMShouldn't JL Kirk and Associates now retain counsel to sue King and Bellow for legal malpractice? How could they have given any worse "counsel" to JL Kirk then to recommend sending a threatening letter to a blogger? A big shot firm like King and Bellow certainly knew the history of taking actions like that. Hasn't Saul and Bellow's counsel to JL Kirk ensured the bankruptcy of that company? Posted by: Narniaman at April 14, 2007 5:10 PMDaniel does make a good point. They handled it poorly, but the ranking of Kat's original post on Google was pretty high before this whole thing exploded a few days ago. I remember from when she originally posted it--she wisely gave it a specific title that would help the search engines find it, and within a pretty short period of time, it worked. I could be mistaken, but I believe her post made the top 10 results even before the C&D letter. Doesn't change the fact that they addressed it unbelievably stupidly and shot themselves in the foot (or, perhaps more accurately, the head)...but yeah, they had a bit of a problem before the blog firestorm began. Posted by: amy at April 14, 2007 5:15 PMAs if the blowback from the lawyer was not enough, I think it's important to note that prior to the legal maneuvering, their employee posted an ill-advised "response" on Ms. Coble's website. It was an emotional, defensive response that in no way served the company well. In it, she accuses Ms. Coble of saying things that she didn't; she accuses Ms. Coble of grammatical and spelling errors while hers is chock-full of the same; she uses personal attacks on both prospective client and Ms. Coble and, most egregiously, she posts examples that are personal in nature against the Cobles and makes her appear as if she is "outing" them as less than stellar. Unbelievable! I worked in the corporate world for years and we were told ad naseum (which the employee misspelled): NEVER put a response in writing that you wouldn't want the world to see; and never, ever talk to the media without permission from media relations. This action by the Company's employee demonstrates either an astonishing lack of understanding of media relations or an equally astonishing underestimation of what the blogosphere is. Idiocy abounds! Interesting to see how this is finally finished. Posted by: Kathy from Austin at April 14, 2007 6:06 PMJust to follow-up, the correct way for JL Kirk to have dealt with a damaging review which was showing up high in the search engines would have been for a Vice-President or President of the company to personally contact Katherine Coble and apologize for the bad impression they'd given her. Then they could have offered to help her husband find a job for free, on the grounds that their reputation was more important to them than any single client fee. The result would almost certainly have been an amended blog post from Katherine and a much more favorable image for JL Kirk. Even if JL Kirk was a total scam company, it should be worth it to them to take extraordinary measures to maintain their facade on the Internet where potential marks can research them. But then you can't logically expect any company which has built its business on high-pressure tactics and intimidation to suddenly be smart and forgo those methods in a new medium (blogs) which it doesn't understand. Perhaps whatever new incarnation Bernard Haldane/JL Kirk Associates morphs into will learn this lesson. Posted by: Daniel Wiener at April 14, 2007 7:32 PMCoble's initial critical post would have been read by, statistically speaking, virtually nobody. (No offense intended, Kat!) Doesn't offend me, Bill. The people we need to worry about offending are the poor few hundred who read me beforehand and now feel like nobodies. ;-p According the the Tennessee Secretary of State website the company JL Kirk Associates of Tennessee was dissolved in August of 2006. An earlier version of this company JL Kirk Associates LLC was dissolved in 2005 (when active was registered to "The Integrity Group of Tennessee") and a third name for this business - JL Kirk Creative INC was disolved in March 2006. Actually the name JL Kirk Associates is a registered trademark so I guess you can forget that last part of my last post. It was registered in Dec 2006 - not so long ago. I have no experise in these matters but I'm wondering how you can operate a business in Tennessee without being registered with the Secretary of State? Posted by: bill at April 15, 2007 10:17 AMI'm just of the opinion with the outrage we've seen and that other bloggers are coming out with their own experiences with JL Kirk that this situation is by no means over. Thank you for the information. I recently recevied an offer from JLK-A and was in the process of my 2nd meeting. While going to the meeting, I called up another headhunter I've been dealing with and she read me the article from the city paper. When I got to the office, the person I was to talk with was 15 minutes late and a gentleman walked in and sat down. Looking a bit desheveled, he asked if I were a client of JLK as well, and when I said no, he replied "Good luck, I've been here for a year and have yet to get the first interview." He then proceeded with "you know $2,400 is a lot of money to pay for this service." I responded, "$2,400!!!!, are you serious?" Yes he said, and "I'm very dissapointed." At that point, I said, "Well, I believe I'll be pro-active and LEAVE NOW." Which is exactly what I did. You need to keep this up, and even call the I-Team to expose this. Taking money from folks who are down on their luck is a bad deal. Thanks again. Posted by: barely_escaped at April 23, 2007 12:48 PMPost a comment
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