LOL Interwebz: There Will be a $500 Fine if You Fail to Share This Column on Facebook

Every Thursday in LOL Interwebz, Luke T. Harrington explores the quirks and foibles of Internet culture from a Gospel perspective.

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“A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches, and favor is better than silver or gold.”
—Proverbs 22:1

In Internet parlance, they call it the Streisand Effect.

In short, it’s when attempts to contain an idea end up resulting in its further dissemination. It’s named (of course) for singer Barbara Streisand, whose lawyers sent out some cease-and-desist letters after finding an unauthorized photo of her California beach mansion online. Prior to those letters, the photo had been viewed a mere six times; once they sent them, it was viewed nearly half a million times in the first month alone. You can now see the photo pretty much anywhere on the Web, including the Wikipedia entry for the Streisand Effect. By attempting to censor the photo, they managed to canonize it as an Internet legend.

In the age of the Interwebz, controlling information just ain’t what it used to be.

The Union Street Guest House, a Catskills-area hotel and reception hall, recently learned about this the hard way when they tried to keep the Internet from finding out how terrible they are. After receiving a strange charge, a recently married couple took a look at the contract they had signed and discovered the following clause:

Please know that despite the fact that wedding couples love Hudson and our inn, your friends and families may not. … If you have booked the inn for a wedding or other type of event … and given us a deposit of any kind … there will be a $500 fine that will be deducted from your deposit for every negative review … placed on any internet site by anyone in your party.

And, obviously, once this clause got some publicity, the Guest House’s Yelp page was completely buried under one-star reviews. Because, the Internet.

Yelp, of course, is famous as That Site Where Disgruntled Customers Go to Vent, and to me its reviews are a lot like Archie comics: I can’t think of a good reason to read them, and nobody I know takes them seriously, and yet, somehow, they’re still a thing. And actually, as it turns out, small businesses are right to be scared of them: according to a Harvard study, a single star increase in your Yelp rating leads to a five to nine percent increase in business. Reputation matters, even if it’s a reputation controlled by the mouth-breathers writing reviews on Yelp.

I’ve been thinking about that Proverb above a lot lately—why is a good name so much better than cash?—and I think the solution lies in my favorite line from Citizen Kane (yes, I have a favorite line from Citizen Kane—don’t you?): “It’s no trick to make a lot of money, if all you want is to make a lot of money.” If all you want is some quick cash, there are thousands of ways to get it: theft, extortion, foreclosing on a bunch of home loans and then claiming you’re too big to fail, etc.

But there’s no shortcut to a good reputation.

It’s possible to manipulate the flow of money in underhanded and dishonest ways, but it’s nearly impossible to build a good reputation for yourself with anything other than hard, honest work. There’s no shortage of businesses who have tried to blackmail their customers into not Yelping their bad experiences; as  Barbara Streisand learned, though, the truth has a habit of coming out—especially when you try to suppress it.

As a culture, we mostly forgot this fact in the 1980s, but good business practices don’t generally look all that different from loving your neighbor. If you treat your customers well, word will get around; if you treat them as enemies, they’ll strike back. If you serve your community, the community will serve you as well, and if you strive to build something that lasts, you’ll likely end up with exactly that. It’s easy to chase money; it’s harder to build something. And yet, if you build something people love, you likely won’t have to worry about money at all. It’s not guaranteed to work, but it’s likely to be more effective than blackmailing your customers.

Probably.