Devoted to the Multi-level marketing (or MLM) industry

Southwest Airlines has a great blog. The airline company seems to "get" the Internet.

Generally speaking, Network Marketing companies are afraid of the Internet. Yes, many have nice web sites that are all jazzed up with flash, but overall they don't "get" it.

Do a Google search for Quixtar and you will find a lot of negative information about the company. The problem for Quixtar is that much of the information is true.

So what does Quixtar do about it?

They hire a hack marketing firm to produce a bunch of fake blogs spreading gibberish posts.  In their attempt to manipulate the search engines, they seemed to forget that real people read blogs. The fake blogs linked to each other and sometimes posted fake interviews on multiple sites, simply changing the names of the people being interviewed, without changing the interview content.

Quixtar was accused of a Google Bomb campaign and their reputation suffered even more, especially among people that understand blogs, linking and Google. The company is now even sited as an example under Google Bomb in wikipedia.

Instead of truly working to correct the actual problems, Quixtar tried to manipulate the search engines to hide the critics, who were voicing their opinions about the problems.

This leads me back to Southwest Airlines. Southwest is not worried about what people are saying because they are proud of how they run their business. No one is perfect and I'm sure that Southwest has it's issues, but they obviously care about doing the right thing and I suspect that if someone posted a negative comment on their blog, a dozen people would comment about their own postitive experience soon after.

It's not hard to figure out which company is authentic.