Black Hat PR

I had never heard of black hat pr until I read Craig McGill page about it.

Craig says

“Now, in the 21st Century, nasty can take a lot of shapes:

• Setting up blogs to rubbish your products
• Hammering your products via Twitter
• Impersonating staff online
• Setting up websites which look like concerned consumer groups or press putting the boot in
• Passing on gossip about your failures/negative incidents to the press
• Having people blog negatively about you
• Old-fashioned badmouthing you in the press or sales meetings
• Poster campaigns
• Ad drops
• Distorting statistics or quotes
• Ambushing events – online or offline
• Trying to bring down your site with Denial of Service attacks
• Buying similar domain names and making it look as if your site is gone
• Buying all the Google adwords
• Having the police raid your premises or stop staff, calling in FAST and making sure the media know about it”

Wow now that is a nasty list, many of them you could see as anti-socia media. Now it is possible to do these things but there is also a huge dander of backlash against any company actually doing these things to their competitors. Would you take the risk? Do you know anyone who has been on the receiving end of black hat PR? Or will own up to doing black hat PR?

Now I have been involved in cleaning up some online reputations and I know companies like Reputation Defender have too, but who else is out there and who would you recommend? I am looking for the good guys not the black hatters.