Big Disclosure of Common Means of Online Public Relations - Formerly Known as Network Maintenance

What is Online Public Relations?

"Actually, online public relations services have been around for a long time; they were just conducted underground in the past. We would only mention it if clients asked," said Sun Mingming, who works in online public relations. In 2008, a negative news article about a certain medical clinic's malpractice was reposted on the community forum of Sun's website. The person in charge of the clinic approached Sun to request its removal. During the signing of the contract, this fee was labeled as "network maintenance fee."

After receiving the payment, Sun conducted a search on relevant search engines like Google and Baidu, discovering that the negative information had not only been reposted on his own site but also spread to some smaller local websites. Since he was familiar with people in the same circle, Sun made a few phone calls to individual webmasters for back-end operations, and the negative information was thus removed from the internet through public relations efforts.

To thank Sun, the clinic placed an advertisement on his website. This year, they continued to sign a one-year contract with Sun, asking him to help them delete negative news within the Dongguan area for an annual fee of 30,000 yuan. "Of course, this 30,000 yuan only includes monitoring small websites in Dongguan. If it involves large websites or media outside the province, the public relations fees will be calculated separately, as we need to find someone to introduce us and make arrangements," Sun explained.

It is understood that although Sun's online public relations business has just been launched, it is progressing quite smoothly. Three other medical clinics have requested help in deleting 13 negative news articles. "Due to the special nature of the medical industry, there are a lot of negative reports. On one hand, it's easy for competitors to fabricate medical accidents and post them online for attacks, which is a false misdirection. On the other hand, if it's true, the parties involved can file complaints with the Health Bureau and let the government impose penalties. Therefore, we generally handle all 'insulting posts' by deleting them," Sun stated.

However, Sun mentioned that he does not dare to delete negative news related to government department notifications, criticisms, or official media reports. "Also, if netizens' complaints are based on solid evidence, deleting them would not be acceptable to the netizens."

Currently, Sun plans to print "Online Negative News Public Relations" on his new business cards. He holds an optimistic attitude towards this new business: "As the influence of the internet grows larger, enterprises or individuals are bound to face some criticism or defamation, which will certainly create a demand for online public relations. Therefore, more companies will engage in online public relations in the future."

The Big Reveal of Online Public Relations - Common Tactics

1. Online Public Relations - Greeting Method

If it involves websites in Dongguan, generally, these posts can be deleted simply by giving a heads-up to the webmaster.

2. Online Public Relations - Coverage Method

For those that cannot be resolved through a simple greeting, optimization of the client's website is usually adopted, making positive news rank higher while allowing negative news to gradually fall to later pages, which is known as suppression. To ensure positive news ranks higher, techniques include searching for positive publicity content online or having the company write a few articles, utilizing network technology to widely disseminate them, covering up the negative information. In short, the further back the negative news appears, the better. This method is typically applied around excellent search engines like Google and Baidu.

3. Shameful Hacker Method

Using hacker techniques to attack and make the entire website inaccessible if they refuse to remove the post. Sun once experienced such an incident: One time, a digital company exposed as a scammer approached him to request the deletion of a negative report. Since this digital company had defrauded a lot of money, Sun did not delete it. However, the next day, the server was attacked and was down for two hours. Due to concerns about business impact, Sun was forced to delete the negative report to restore normal operations.