Visionfriendly attempts to remove negative reviews from former employees

The following information is FACT and cannot therefore be disputed with a claim of slander or libel. The research that follows will show the details of the situation. Let the reader decide if this public move was damaging or helpful.

Visionfriendly.com has successfully managed to have a myriad of negative reviews removed from Jobvent- a website that was previously dedicated to allowing users to anonymously share their experiences while working for companies. Jobvent is now called Jobitorial, and as of December 12, 2010, the only review of Visionfriendly says "A job is a job, better to be working than starving I guess."

So how did this page used to look? While the page is no longer in Google's cache, we can see how Visionfriendly's rating was with the following cached screenshot:



As you can see- after 16 reviews from former employees of Visionfriendly, the company had a score of -446 meaning that almost every review universally rated down every aspect of working at Visionfriendly.

Further, the situation was even reported on by a blogger in an article entitled Why you should monitor the top search results for your brand keywords. In it, we read the following quote:

you search for “VisionFriendly.com” in Google, the seventh result link to numerous negative reviews of the company at JobVent.com. In fact, 14 people said the company is bad to work for, while just one said it is good to work for.

One person complained about “derogatory ‘pet names,’” another about the stress and low pay, and another about how management yells for no reason.

I don’t know about you, but if I came across these comments I’d be very hesitant to seek a job with the company.

So Visionfriendly has managed to get these reviews removed. Good for them. That's what brand management is all about. But have they actually improved their work environment? Does the owner still yell at his employees as so many former employees claimed? Until you see evidence that the situation has improved by a rash of legitimate positive reviews (that don't appear to be fake), it may be prudent to steer clear from Visionfriendly as a place of employment.

The previous article stated only claims that were backed up by archived search results. Any attempt to take legal action against this blog will fail as the information here contained is not slanderous. This is merely a report on what has occurred.

A change of pace

I received a demand letter today from Vision Friendly requiring me to take down the prior blog post.

My gut reaction- and my response to the lawyer was to prove how the post didn't have any defamatory content- but upon rereading it for the first time in 3 months, I have concluded that indeed- there are some unsubstantiated claims. I am de-publishing the entry and rethinking how things are worded so that it will be more editorial and opinion-centric in nature. I am, of course, very passionate about web design and cleaning up the internet- but my intentions are not to be harmful to others. Stay tuned...