Some times people just need to vent and I’m always here for ya. Some friends of mine have been online bullied for years as you will read below. Taking the high road is difficult without blowing up. So I’m giving her the space to vent about it here. I worked as their assistant for a bit & witnessed the stealing first hand and the lies to cover it up. Disgusting businesses practices that are so difficult not to call out. Because it won’t do any good to call them out. We ask below if you have dealt with online business bullying.
My business partner and I have been successfully running an online business for the past 2 1/2 years. Our product review blogging business has continued to thrive and grow at paces that we didn’t even expect. In less than 1 1/2 years we went from being “unknowns” in our niche to being “well-known” with a Google Page Rank 4 blog.
Within a few months of us starting our product review blog and having growing success with it, several of our online friends and people that we knew decided to jump on the bandwagon and start their own. While we were not pleased with being copied by our so-called friends, we did accept it and for a time, continued to be friends with these few people.
Within a few months of them copying us and publishing their own review blogs, we found out that a few of them were indeed competing with us and not doing it in a fair and honest manner. We have always prided ourselves on being respectful towards others in our same niche and we have always remained the constant professionals, no matter what others have done to us.
We have had these few people do some of the following things to us:
- Steal textual content from our blog.
- Steal our Google Page Rank button from our blog & post it on their own blog.
- Email our sponsors and advertisers to come sponsor reviews/giveaways on their blogs and in those emails they actually “bashed” us to the company.
- Sit and Stalk our blog for hours upon hours a week! No kidding, these folks have no life and were spending 4 to 8 hours a week on our blog digging through our archives and helping themselves.
- Sitting in private Yahoo groups and/or Ning groups (social networking groups and sites) and bashing us to others within our same niche. I guess they thought that “unprofessional” talk would never get back to us.
- Run around on our blogs and leave us nasty & rude anonymous comments. (however, we can indeed see their IP’s, so we knew who it was right from the start).
- They think they are being slick by using “Hide My Ass” and other URL hiders but guess what? Our tracking software is high-tech and we could/can still see them and we do know who they are!
- Sign us up for spam email lists that we never signed up for.
- Have their friends and/or business associates attack us on social media sites.
- and many more very ugly things!
While all of this smack talking, stalking of our sites, bullying us online, spreading lies and gossip, etc. has hurt our feelings by these “so-called” competitive friends, it has done much more than that! It has hurt our business and our business reputation! Luckily for us, most companies and people that we deal with can see that we run a honest and professional business and won’t engage these “rotten eggs” on public social media outlets.
We chose to do the professional thing by keeping our mouth’s shut for over 1 1/2 years about it and never released details. We have always hoped that this issue would go away and stay away, but it hasn’t. These “rotten eggs” will leave us alone for a little while and then a few weeks later their “gossip” gets backs to us once again.
We will continue to do the professional thing by not trashing them on sites or in groups but we do pray that someday they will grow up and leave us alone. This isn’t high school girls, it’s the REAL adult business world and you all should conduct yourselves in a professional and ethical manner.
The reason I am discussing this topic on Val’s wonderful blog today is that I want people to know that there are adults online who bully (or try-to bully) other adults online. Those who run in these online cliques and gangs can and do hurt others with their nonsense. We wanted other victims of online adult business bullying to know that there are indeed others out there who are victims of this type of behavior too, and you are not alone with being a bullying victim.
Thank you Val for letting us “air-out” some dirty laundry today and discuss online adult business bullying on your blog. We welcome your comments!
~ Signed: Two Victims of Adult Online Business Bullying
I’ve been ‘here’ through all this and the bully truly is insane…she needs to crawl back under the rock she came out from.
And, staying ‘professional’ is the best way to go..companies/products/brands see that and reward for that…eventually the bully will get hers…
Tara Burner recently posted..Weekly Update
Yes, have to stand strong with the karma. Although it’s so difficult. They do a much better job at it than I think I could.