Follow-up on Essent Healthcare Attacking Blogger
I will admit I don't even know who Essent Healthcare is. I don't know if they do a good job or a bad job. I do know that there is a blogger dedicated to sounding the alarm about Essent. But there are such gadflies for nearly every major corporation. But in this case Essent is making the classic PR mistake of trying to silence a blogger by taking expensive-to-defend-against legal action against the blogger. Specifically, Essent is trying to force the blogger's ISP to reveal the identity of the blogger and his confidential informants, many of whom are employees of Essent likely to face retaliation (more here).
I made the point that this kind of thing always backfires, as publicity tied to such suits and the inevitable backlash from bloggers tends to greatly expand the audience of these small bloggers from a few people who are already disgruntled with the target company to a much wider and more damaging audience.
Case in point: Look who is suddenly the #1 & #2 Google search return for "problems at essent healthcare." Neither site was in the top 100 a few days ago.
Christopher Fritz:
And on top of that, I see Coyote Blog as tenth result in a Google search for "essent healthcare" (no quotes), and ninth when using quotes. Nice!
September 25, 2007, 6:41 pm