I read an interesting blog this past week and winced when I read it. I would imagine that a junior staffer wrote it and if the president of the company saw it, it would be taken down immediately.
The blog post was a rant about why an unnamed competitor was stealing this firm’s thunder and online juice. The blog post details seven points that the writer was upset about from bidding on their firms name in AdWords, copying service offerings, imitating content, and blog post commenting with links back to their own website.
The title caught my eye, but when I read the blog post I thought “ouch, this rant should have been filtered”. When you rant on your own blog about a competitor or situation especially when you don’t name names (and you should not), you come off sounding like a whiner and a bad sport.
Yes, pretty sucky things can really happen in the world of business, but you don’t have to blog about them and take a black eye in the process. I recommend that sensitive and negative issues unless done as a case study in a thought provoking objective way be off topic for blogs. You may end up doing more damage to your own online reputation than you would think making your competitor howl for glee.