(photo credit: banky177)

Is bad publicity good publicity? A while back, when Holiday Velvet wasn’t yet 2 years old, a forum conversation started about us on “Lay my Hat“. This forum allows vacation rental owners to discuss tips and news about the industry. I highly recommended it: as you will read below, the partakers are extremely witty. 

The post about us didn’t start off very well and ended even worse. Firstly we were labelled “total incompetents”, “spammers”, “excruciating use of English”… I read this and I thought “well this might be tough to hear but I can fix all those issues“. At least two owners said that they were happy to give us a try because they had found us high up in Google. 

Trouble is the conversation then turned into a joke about our brand name. I can laugh about these comments now but I must admit that at the time I felt like crying:

“the rental listing name sounds either rude or like toilet roll to me”

 ”It sounds like a tame soft porno term to me”

So overnight our brand was associated with toilet paper? As you can imagine it was a bit of blow. When you work so hard on growing a business and you get the likes of “sue dyer” “giddy goat” and  “loopy lou” destroying it, you may for a second – and I did – feel like giving it all up. Of course, we didn’t give it up **sigh of relief**.

Today I’m happy to report that 30% of the people who commented on this thread are now – or were at one point – advertisers on Holiday Velvet. I cannot tell you how many referrals we got from this post (there is no hyperlinked URL to us) but even if only 1% of the people who viewed the thread decided to give us a try then we should have gotten 33 registrations from it – to this date.

So is bad publicity good publicity? Well in my experience if it is a benign as this then absolutely! Anyone else wants to comment on our brand name? Bring it on!