Last year, Dr. Simon Singh was sued by the British Chiropractic Association for publishing his doubts on what some chiropractors were claiming their care could cure.  His article in the Guardian explained  there was little (if any) evidence to support some of the claims used by the BCA concerning what chiropractors could treat.  The resulting law suit got very messy and,  because the UK laws greatly favor those who claim defamation, things are not going well for the BCA.  Much attention is now focused on the questionable treatments the BCA once boasted about.

Surprisingly, much of the “dirt” that has resulted from this case has been uncovered by a group of bloggers that dug deeper into the case than some UK journalists.  One blogger reports that every chiropractor associated with the BCA is being examined for false marketing claims.  The findings show that a staggering one in four chiropractors in Britain are now under investigation for allegedly making misleading claims in advertisements.

If the BCA is smart, they will rethink their marketing plan STAT, or the world of chiropractic “medicine” will change forever.

Post from: The Streisand Effect

A “crack-down” on UK Chiropractors

The story became viral most recently when South Butt released a Facebook app that allows you to use your judgment to see if you can “tell a butt from a face.”  The popularity of the app strengthens South Butt’s case that their brand is truly a mere parody and proves that the class clown can sometimes come out ahead of the school bully.

North Face’s decision to sue ultimately ruined their reputation.  Sorry Biff, your days are over.

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Pick on somebody your own size.

When you sign up, you pay about $5 for shipping and that’s it.  However, buried deep in the site it tells you that they’ll be sending you a bunch of other stuff and charging you $290 for it.  Not good.

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch called them out on it, and they’ve responded by loudly complaining about it.  Their complaints have led to even more people finding out about what they do.

The Consumerist has a great recap of the entire situation.  Not only are they apparently a very shady company, they’re pretty dumb too.  When someone writes stuff like that about your company, the last thing you want to do is draw more attention to it.  Oops…

Post from: The Streisand Effect

The Video Professor wants to make sure you know how scammy he is.

The lawyers never seem to get the fact that some things just aren’t that interesting until they try to force people not to talk about them. And that’s certainly the case with London headquartered Barclays bank, which has fought the UK newspaper The Guardian all week over the publication of internal Barclays Bank documents alleged to detail huge tax avoidance schemes by the company that total more than $16 billion.

It’s really quite simple.  Before the lawyers made a stink about this, the documents had been accessed by a grand total of 127 people.  Now the WikiLeaks page has been overwhelmed with traffic, and thousands of people have seen the documents.  Oops indeed.

Post from: The Streisand Effect

Barclays seems to have something to hide. Oops.

• first day at work. omg!! So dull!!
• all i do is shred holepunch n scan paper!!! omg!
• im so totally bord!!!

Considering the kind of work she describes, I can’t say I blame her for being bored.  Her boss didn’t see it that way.  After discovering the posts, he called Kimberley into his office, fired her, and told her:

I have seen your comments on Facebook and I don’t want my company being in the news.

Oops.  He didn’t mention any problems with her performance, and she hadn’t been using the companies name in her updates.  It’s also not clear whether she was posting from work or not, but it seems that she was.  If it was a problem, he probably should have at least asked her not to play on Facebook during work, which would be fair.

As it turns out, this story is now on the Daily Mail, Fark, Fox News, the Telegraph and many other sites.  So much for keeping his company out of the news.

Post from: The Streisand Effect

Make sure people don’t know that Ivell Marketing is a boring place to work

According to the researchers:

It was hardly their intention. But since the article was withdrawn, I have received lots of mail and requests for copies of the article. The article would not have been read to this extent if the company had simply ignored it in silence.

The fact that they jumped right into legal action rather than trying to set the facts straight tells me that the technology journal probably has the right story.

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Nemesysco makes it well-known that their lie detector has issues

It’s shocking how many big companies still don’t have a clue about the Streisand Effect.  The latest comes from De Beers.

A couple of weeks ago, a spoofed version of the New York Times was handed out in New York.  They printed thousands of copies, headlined with “IRAQ WAR ENDS” and dated July 4, 2009.  It was kind of funny, everyone had a laugh, and by now we’d forgotten all about it.  Except for De Beers.

Buried in the online version of the paper is a fake De Beers ad.  It wasn’t remarkably funny and didn’t get much attention.  However, De Beers is now sending the legal dogs after it.  Oddly, they’re going after the domain registrar for the site rather than the people that created the ad.

As TechDirt points out, the registrar is clearly protected from this type of action, and the ad is quite clearly a protected parody.  The only thing that’s going to happen is that:

A — More people will see the ad that De Beers wants removed.
B — De Beers comes across looking like a cocky, out-of-touch company.

Nice move.

Post from: The Streisand Effect

Did you see the De Beers ad in the NY Times spoof? Now you will.

Canon has a new 5D MKII camera that apparently is quite awesome.  Robert Scoble was slobbering all over the awesomeness of it, and the CEO of SmugMug wrote a long blog post to show off the amazing video quality.  Canon should have been loving the free publicity.  Instead, they requested the footage be removed, but didn’t say why.  They have some of it posted on their own site, but in much lower quality.

Scoble hypothesizes that the super-HQ video at SmugMug was making someone at Canon look bad, but that’s pretty weak if it’s true.

The only thing I can figure is that it might be an attempt at a reverse Streisand Effect, something that’s never been pulled off successfully — generate publicity by trying to hide something, in the hopes that more people will see it.  In this case, maybe they’re hoping it will draw more attention to their camera.  Maybe it’ll work.  I still think they’re idiots.

Post from: The Streisand Effect

Don’t make Canon look too good – mediocre is preferred

It’s yet another case where it’s having the exact opposite of the desired effect.  Now everyone knows about these documents, and they’ll never be able to get them taken offline.

Why don’t these people understand how things work?

Post from: The Streisand Effect

Mormons want you to read their old documents

According to the owner of a local news stand, a man wearing a shirt with a WSJ logo purchased every copy of the parody paper using a corporate American Express card.  He apparently went around to different stands to buy up all of the copies that he could, in an effort to hide the parody paper.

The result was predictable — Huffington Post (NSFW sketch in that link) wrote a story about it, which reached Digg, and now thousands of people have seen the paper.  I would have never seen this story if the man hadn’t tried to hide it.

Post from: The Streisand Effect

Wall Street Journal rep tries to buy all of the copies of a WSJ parody paper