Spin Hunters

There is a new documentary coming up this weekend on MTV about Britney Spears. It is called Britney: For the Record and it aims to rebuild her reputation after months of a total meltdown. It is expected to be a heart-breaking story about her emotional collapse and the way she completely lost her way to the top. Funny enough, MTV was blamed a year ago that it deliberately helped destroying her image by letting her on stage of the MTV Music Awards 2007. [...]

I have a quite unique job and to the best of my knowledge only around 50 people worldwide are actually doing this for a living. Pretty cool, ah?! I am a professional spin hunter and I try to protect our corporate clients in terms of deliberate reputation and image attacks. The irony here is that although the cases of negative reputation campaigns are growing faster, the PR industry in general demonstrate a lack of knowledge about these matters and the way modern communication strategies operate. [...]

Detecting malicious identity attacks is one of the hardest tasks that many organizations face today. The reason why this is so, is because most of the BPR attacks are products of extremely sophisticated campaigns (yes, some people actually do this) and rely on the availability of special professional skills such as ethical information gathering, slander proficiency and business intelligence. [...]