Earlier this week, we noticed MindBody had hijacked a question on Quora: Does MindBody have competitors? Who are they? Previously, we and a number of other competitors to mindbody showed up on this page.
Suddenly, the #1 answer was written by Dana Auriemma. With an extraordinary amount of hubris, Dana writes:
"I have an unbiased point-of-view because I don't work for any of the competitors that are answering this question. "
Dana conveniently leaves out that she actually WRITES FOR MINDBODY! Meet MindBody's business blogger, and she actively promotes this writing on her twitter account.
Check out @mindbodyonline for my business advice and training articles twice a month: http://t.co/WNVjKpAmhc
— Dana Auriemma (@DanaAuriemma) September 21, 2013
Since Dana is supposedly a business blogger that shares business tips, let me share a business 101 lesson with you: Don't lie and misrepresent yourself on public forums. People will find out.
Quora is supposed to be a place for organic content and honest answers. It's a great place to go to hear all sides of the story. I've read information there we've never read anywhere else.
From Quora's Crunchbase page:
Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.
It seems that mindbody has resorted to lying by omission and has their employees writing fake reviews. Here's another one, this time by Patricia Stern:
Of course, Patricia conveniently leaves out that she works for mindbody in tech support.
If I were Rick Stollmeyer, I'd be worried about this. The NY Times recently reported that the NY attorney general just snared 19 companies in a sting operation for writing fake reviews on sites such as Yelp, Google Local, and City Search.
What's sad about this is that we've even written in the past about how what makes this market so great is that there's room enough here for everyone.
What does it say about a company when they've raised $50 million, yet they're still so insecure that they have to try and game public quora threads, and write fake reviews?
How many customers do you have to start losing before you resort to lying in the open?
UPDATE
The Quora thread has now been updated, with most of the comments and 'answers' by mindbody employees either being deleted by the users themselves, or flagged by the Quora staff.
