Guest post by Iuliana Butuc-Cerchez

Let’s say you are the founder and the general manager of an Internet company. One of the best in your country. Let’s say that a worldwide financial crisis makes you afraid of the future.

Let’s say that you have a dating portal in your management, besides other websites (a job portal and so on). Let’s say that, in the country where the biggest chunk of your market is, one TV show proposes you, the general manager, to participate and to make fun of yourself right there on the screen, in the front of several million TV viewers. The “prize”, if you happen to be the winner of the TV contest, is to get married to a so-called TV star. Not a nice or hot looking one, believe me!

Would you accept the proposal? Would you choose to be the subject of mockery in blog posts and press articles and, also, to “risk” getting married to a woman of doubtful reputation just to advertise your dating portal? Really, how low can you go with your personal brand to get some awareness on the TV for one of your company’s products?

Iuliana Butuc-Cerchez has been the Corporate Affairs Manager of the Gecad Group for over 4 years. She’s an exceptional PR professional and a true mentor for me. Before starting her PR career, she used to be this hard-core IT journalist at one of the best business and financial newspapers in Romania. She’s also a blogger, but as her blog is in Romanian, only part of my readers will be able to enjoy her articles.

Company X Romania is a well respected company on the domestic market. It’s been around for a while and would not for the life of me yield the “beginner marketer” idea in my head. Yet I got this spammy comment (yes, I always double-check Akismet) promoting one of their not so recent announcements.  The comment was made by a guy linking to an internet marketing site of exactly one page. No link to company X whatsoever, just the info on them…

Now, there are a few issues to consider:

• Is X paying these guys or testing what they can do? Well, then, they are doing a pretty bad job, they don’t even use spammy links to X. And why would the company’s Romanian branch benefit from traffic from foreign sites when it clearly targets Romania?
• Are they trying to impress X Romania on their own, trying to get a contract signed? Really bad strategy then.
• Is this company trying to show off their web exposure skills and traffic increasing strategy to other bloggers? Even worse strategy…
• Are they harvesting links to their site with randomly picked news excerpts based on a blogger’s country of origin? Possible. Again, poor strategy! They promote their internet marketing services, I am sure there are quite a few posts here they could have chosen for a legitimate comment and a link (do follow one even)

If X Romania is actually paying these guys to generate traffic to their site, worse choice ever!

If X Romania is in no way affiliated with these spammers, how can they protect their image? Hope this is a one-time offense? Read this post and contact the guys?  They have a one page site and two email addresses as contacts, is there any real chance to get them to stop? Hope everyone will understand it’s the last issue I pointed to and no one will think X=SPAM?

What can you really do when a bogus “internet marketing guru” is using your brand to spam others? Disclose it and hope for some good online coverage? Warn said company and hope they’ll stop. Ignore them and pray this goes away without an image crisis? What do you think?

The Thirteenth Tale, the debut novel of Diane Setterfield, is one of the most intriguing, entertaining and troubling stories I’ve read in quite a while. It is a story of shadows, twins, strange children and even stranger parents, of ghosts, fears, and a search for the truth.

It all starts when Vida Winter, said to be one of the most famous writers in UK and the world, known to be feeding amazing yet untrue stories, always different, to the press and to biographers when asked about her life, contacts Margaret Lea, the daughter of a bookstore owner, to write her biography. Although all her books are famous, Vida Winter is also well known for publishing a book whose title refers to 13 stories but only contains 12. The stories are strange real-life interpretations of children’s fairy tales, such as Cinderella, who’s a simple farmer’s daughter raped by the prince and never searcher for the next day. And everyone is anxious to find out which is the 13th story.

Vida reveils the strange story of the Angelfield family which she’s supposedly a part of, a tragic tale of affairs between siblings, strange twin girls that spread fear on an entire village, a fire that takes down the Angelfield mansion, love stories and much more. It all builds up towards an unexpected ending, a truth revealed by Margaret after facing her own twin ghost. I whole heartedly recommend the book to you if you want to know the secrets, mysteries and pain of the missing thirteenth story.

What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

Welcome to this weeks list of reading tips! Hope you all have something useful, inspirational or interesting here. And don’t forget to add to the list in the comment box

We’ve all heard a lot and read even more on the economic downfalls the whole world seems to be dealing with and especially the US. I found some great tips on how to deal with what’s coming on Erica.biz revealing the most efficient way to invest in an economic downturn.

Darren Rowse made a pretty good point: no matter how popular your blog is, it’s still a work in progress. That’s why it’s important to know just how to capture more repeat visitors.

Amber Naslund of Brand Box published an article on how to turn weird business buzzwords into plain English, with lots of hilarious examples of what not to do.

Google page rands, organic traffic and statistics are part of our everyday world. Of the spiders, Google is the first one on our minds. But to really take our blog or site to the next level, Tad Chef things we should forget about Google. And he’s right, SEO 2.0 should be about people, not spiders.

Is there a better way to help SMBs understand the importance of reputation management better than an extreme example? Not really, and Matt McGee chose the best possible example to illustrate the fact that an online reputation is crucial to getting more business.

That’s all for today, see you all next Monday for another roundup of the most eye-catching stories of the week!

Call it the Romania brand, call it the image of Romania, call it what people think of when they hear the words “Romanian” or “Romania”. Whatever you choose, it has huge problems and a lot of people still make offending faces when finding out someone is Romanian or when hearing news about this country.

I’ve read quite a few news on how a new campaign had been launched, about how I don’t know what design company has been paid too much for a logo design that sucks. All the stories on how others wrongfully perceive us immediately make it to all mainstream media. And what happen when there’s a piece of great news to be told about Romanians and their achievements? Not much!

Did you know the first person to win a race on the new Singapore circuit was a Romanian driver? Did you know the first national anthem to be played there was hours? I only found out through a blog post by a Romanian PR blogger who has complaining how no one is talking about it. She also gave everyone the link of the official BMW Formula announcement (photo credit also goes to them) on Doru Sechelariu’s victory.

Yesterday I googled his name, hoping from some more relevant news to appear in the result page. Did it happen? Not really. Two important sites had some news about them, the best results were for a regional paper, and one of the major sports newspapers that actually had published a piece about it didn’t appear on the first 3 pages. Yet, Loredana, the blogger initially talking about the news told me they published a short piece in “Other Sports”.

Who’s responsible for our country’s international image? Yes, the government plays it’s part, not extremely good, but the press should really pitch in to let us know how great our country really is, so that we can be confident enough to spread the word even further. The first major problem of our country’s brand is that we don’t believe in it, we’re not loyal, and don’t feel like giving it good reviews.

When my aunt was told in an Italian airport that some rules are only enforced for Romanians because they try to circumvent so many laws, did she or any other countryman think to say that was a discriminatory policy? When news of how certain people of Romanian citizenship (I refuse to debate ethnicity here) did something wrong are heard, do we at least try some kind of defense? How many of us want to live the country because they can get a huge house on the Rhine with the same price they’d pay for a one room apartment in Bucharest?

It’s like having eveyrone in the Coca-Cola team or Nike team or L’Oreal team believing their products are really bad, there’s no change of anything changing in the future and they can either change jobs or accept things as they are.

Then again, having negative comments and articles coming your way won’t stop after sending a few letters to foreign politicians or having some nice videos shown at travel and tourism events.  Others are really working on promoting their countries: take a look at Turkey who has posters spread throughout Western Europe!

First people have to really find out about our country. Then it would be great if they’d receive more positive messages, not all this negativity. But to achieve this we need to work a little on ourselves and everything we have to offer, then at least know about our own values and further promote them abroad.

It’s nice that we mention some Olympic gold medals and all that. But letting such breaking news go by is really stupid. Formula 1 is big in Romania, so one could assume there are quite a lot of poeple who enjoy fast cars racing, so Formul BMW is not that far fetched.

But as a friend says, all the sport news over here aren’t even about football anymore, they are about football gossip. Which really contradicts everything the Journalism faculty ever tought us…Maybe we should all pitch in and build our country a really amazing Marketing and PR strategy! I know we can. Some have already started.