Reputation gone bad
Here's an example.
Delta airlines was exposed to a nearby Google listing that had a tagline of, "Less leg room, no privacy." This indicated that millions of customers, employees, journalists, investors, and business persons are exposed to the corporate information that is extremely damaging to the company. This doesn't include any viral pass along either.
Protest sites are also actively undermining the reputation of many leading companies, including AOL, Home Depot, Citibank, American Airlines, Ford, Merrill Lynch, Allstate, Microsoft, McDonald’s, Monsanto, Altria, United Airlines, Ford and Nike, among many others.
While some of the protest sites are little more than a repository for immature humor, i.e. "cybergraffiti," others feature detailed and sometimes persuasive critiques, including 'insider' information. Some are established by advocacy groups, law firms (some of whom are involved in class action lawsuits) and disgruntled consumers. Others have been set up by unions and aggrieved shareholders or laid-off employees. The generally simple architecture of the sites, combined with basic search engine optimization and linking strategies, enables many of these sites to appear prominently under company names in engines.
